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LIBRARY. OF CONGRESS, 


CfcuLui Cnjiyririljl l)a. 

Shelf Jlsi&L St 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 















. . 































THE STORY OF A RANCH 


BY y / 

ALICE WELLINGTON ROLLINS. 

IV 


“ And not through eastern windows only, 

When daylight comes, comes in the light ; — 

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, 

But westward look, — the land is bright.” 

— Arthur Hugh Clough. 



NEW YORK : 

CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited, 
739 & 741 Broadway. 






\ 


Copyright 

1885 

By O. M. DUNHAM. 




L. Mershon & Co., 
Printers and Electrotypers. 
Rahway, N. J. 


THE STORY OF A RANCH 


PART I. 


INTRODUCTION. 


“To river pastures of his flocks and herds 
Admetus rode, where sweet-breathed cattle grazed ; 
Heifers and goats and kids and foolish sheep 
Dotted cool, spacious meadows with bent heads, 

And necks’ soft wool broken in yellow flakes, 

Nibbling, sharp-toothed, the rich, thick-growing blades.” 



HERE was once a firm. It was in its 


JL way quite an ideal firm. Consisting as 
it did of a Millionaire blissfully indifferent 
to the manner in which his millions were 
being spent, a Man of Leisure with nothing 
to do but to travel, for the best interests of 
the “ concern/’ between New York and Car- 
neiro, and an Enthusiast who desired noth- 
ing but the privilege of doing all the work, 
I can not see that it lacked any element 
desirable in firms. For some time the 


2 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


Enthusiast was indulged in his passion for 
living and laboring at the ranch, for the 
Millionaire had a yacht, and the Man of 
Leisure had a family. The prairie was not 
supposed to be adapted to the yacht, and 
seemed equally unattractive to people who 
required schools, libraries, and the opera. 
But summer came, when school was not, and 
society palled. 

Some of them were too young to be car- 
ried to Europe, and others were too old to 
start for California. Mount Desert was too 
crowded, and Montclair too lonely. They 
went to the Adirondacks last year, and were 
going to the Great Lakes next year. They 
knew all about Newport and Nonquitt, and 
not enough about Tadousac. Where were 
they to go ? 

“ Why not go out to the ranch? ” 

It was, of course, the young gentleman of 
the family who made the suggestion. He 
was gazed at. 

Was he quite crazy ? Did he remember 
that to live on a ranch meant to do without 
fish? Had he forgotten that they would be 
not only twelve miles from a lemon, but a 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 3 

thousand miles from a strawberry? Was 
he, perhaps, aware that it was hot in Kan- 
sas, and that there were undoubtedly mus- 
quitoes? that there was never any breeze, 
though always too much wind ? and that 
they would suffer from an utter dearth of 
trees and ice, and that it would not be a 
place where they could wear embroidered 
white dresses, and that the only things of 
which there would be a sufficient supply 

would be rattlesnakes and cyclones ? A 

was also sure that there were no sunflowers, 
though this afterward proved to be a mis- 
take. To all of which the young gentleman 
replied, stolidly, “Well, what is the use of 
having a ranch if you are never going to see 
it?” 

The family reflected. After all, the En- 
thusiast had always said that life at the 
ranch was not only profitable but delightful. 
It was barely possible that he might be tell- 
ing the truth. He was put upon his honor 
and the following facts were elicited : 

There were no mosquitoes, and occasion- 
ally it was cool. Sometimes the thermom- 
eter stood at ioo° in the shade — or would if 


4 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


there were any shade — but in the rarer air 
they would not realize it. They would live 
through the cyclones, and forget all about 
the strawberries. Besides, there were 
melons. They could buy saddle-horses for 
from thirty to. sixty dollars apiece, feed 
them all summer on the prairie, and sell 
them in the fall probably at a profit. Some 
of them didn’t care for mountains, and 
so they would like it, and the rest of them 
didn’t care for the sea, and so they would 
like it. The shooting was prime, and there 
were fifty acres of sunflowers. Moreover, 
there was a new breed of ram, pure Atwood, 
and if they did not consider a mere journey 
of two or three days and three nights worth 
undertaking for the pleasure of seeing that 
ram alone, it was quite hopeless to think of 
presenting any further attraction, and they 
were unworthy of possessing even a pecun- 
iary interest in a ranch. 

They not only went, but they went in 
April ; and they not only staid, but they 
staid till November. If the proof of the 
pudding is in the eating, it is sufficiently 
evident that ranch life was delightful. 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


5 


Early as they had arrived, the flowers had 
come before them, and the barbaric splendor 
of the scenes in Aida and LA fricaine seemed 
repeated as the glorious panorama of blos- 
soming prairie unrolled day after day. Can 
you picture to yourself ten acres of portu- 
lacca ? or whole hillsides curtained with what 
seems a superb variety of wistaria, except 
that it grows on a stalk instead of hanging 
from a vine ? Do you know how it feels not 
to be able to step without crushing a flower, 
so that the little prairie-dogs, sitting con- 
tentedly with their intimate friends the owls 
on the little heaps of earth thrown up 
around their holes, have every appearance 
of having planted their own front yards with 
the choicest floral varieties? Think of driv- 
ing into a great field of sunflowers, the 
horses trampling down the tall stalks, that 
spring up again behind the carriage, so that 
one outside the field would never know that 
a carriage-load of people were any where in 
it; or riding through a “ grove ” of them, 
the blossoms towering out of reach as you 
sit on horseback, and a tall hedge of them 
grown up as a barrier between you and your 


6 


THE STORY OF A RANCH . 


companion! Not a daisy, or a buttercup, or 
a clover, or a dandelion, will you see all sum- 
mer ; but new flowers too exquisite for 
belief ; the great white prickly poppies, and 
the sensitive rose, with its leaves delicate as 
a maiden-hair fern, and its blossom a count- 
less mass of crimson stamens tipped with 
gold, and faintly fragrant. Even familiar 
flowers are unfamiliar in size and profusion 
and color. What at home would be a daisy, 
is here the size of a small sunflower, with 
petals of delicate rose-pink, raying from a 
cone-shaped center of rich maroon shot with 
gold. A had brought with her numer- 

ous packages of seeds and slips, nobly bent 
on having ribbon flower beds and mosaic 
parterres about the house ; but she sat on 
the steps and threw them broadcast, never 
knowing, in the profusion of flowers that 
would have been there any way, whether 
hers ever came up or not. And how beau- 
tiful were the grasses — the most useful one 
the most beautiful of all ; the delicate little 
“ buffalo-grass,” for which the prairie is 
famous, waving its tiny curled sickle of 
feathery daintiness as if its beauty were its 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


7 


only excuse for being, yet bravely “ curing ” 
itself into dry hay as it stands, when the 
autumn winds begin to blow, that the happy 
flocks may “ nibble, sharp-toothed, the rich, 
thick-growing blades ” all through the win- 
ter, without their being gathered into 
barns. 

They raised their vases too. Bric-a-brac 
does not flourish in rooms whose doors and 
windows are open all day long to a Kansas 
breeze ; so, when something was necessary 
for holding flowers, they would wander out 
oyer the prairie with a hammer, pick up a 
round stone, perhaps the size of a thimble, 
perhaps as big as a large bowl, crack 
it open, pour out the fine sand within 
it, and find a cavity as perfect as if hollowed 
out with an instrument, and as smooth as if 
lined with porcelain. 

“ My mother says that sand is splendid 
for cleaning knives,” observed a small 
herder one day, watching their operations. 
Not eliciting any decided enthusiasm, he 
continued : 

“I’m going to Chicago next week! 
Chicago’s an awful big city.” 


8 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


“ But not so big as New York, where we 
live, you know.” 

“Oh, I know all about York! it’s down 
by the ocean. I’ve never seen an ocean, 
but I’ve heard one.” 

“ Where ? ” 

“ In a shell.” 

“ But we’ve been across the ocean ! ’way 
over on the other side of it.” 

“ Ho ! that ain’t nothin’. My mother was 
born over there. In Ireland.” 

Nor did they miss the flowers after dark ; 
for then the prairie fires lighted up the scene 
with rare magnificence of color. Not the 
deadly autumn fires, bringing with them, 
when the grass is dry, fear and desolation, 
but the fires set purposely in safe places in 
the spring, that the young grass may come 
up greener. There is nothing terrible in the 
sight ; there are no falling buildings, and 
you hear no hissing, crackling flames. The 
low grass burns so quietly and steadily that 
the effect is simply that of great lighted 
cities in the distance. 

“ I suppose some of those fires must be 
in the next county,” remarked A — 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 9 

“All our own fires on our own property, 
I can assure you,” answered the proud 
Enthusiast. 

It was long before they could accustom 
themselves to this magnified scale of things ; 
to realizing that they were living on ten 
thousand acres of their own ; to the thought 
of caring for ten thousand sheep ; to driv- 
ing all the afternoon on their own “lawn,” 
and making excursions for the day on their 
own property. Once, when they had ridden 
late and far, and had quite lost their way, they 
stopped at one of the adobe huts — wonder- 
fully picturesque with flowers blossoming on 
the roof, and near by the “ Kansas stable,” 
with its one horse only sheltered as to its 
head — to ask their way. “ And what prop- 
erty are we on now? ” asked Admetus. 

“ The Monte Carneiro Ranch, sir.” 

“ Thank you ; good-day ! ” and Admetus 
rode on, to hide his smile at having to be 
told that he was on his own land. The 
sense of ownership was not slow to develop, 
however, and even the Baby became so 
imbued with the size of the ranch as to 
say sometimes, when they were driving 


to 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


fifteen or twenty miles from home, “ Papa, I 
suppose you’ll be cutting this grass pretty 
soon ? ” 

In the middle of the summer came Col- 
onel Higginson’s article in the Harper on 
the Indian hieroglyphics, with illustrations 
to prove the similarity between the famous 
Dighton rock and many found at the West. 

“They say that there are Indian hiero- 
glyphics on our rock at the cave,” remarked 
the Enthusiast, carelessly. 

“ Why haven t you told us before ? ” 

“ Because my enthusiasm is limited to 
sheep; but you can investigate if you like.” 

Whereupon an imperative order was sent 
to the stable for “ponies for six, immediately 
after luncheon.” 

Many and many a time they had been to 
the Cave, which was quite the piece de re- 
sistance of their excursions. It was no mere 
cavern in the side of a hill, but a cave so 
high that they could ride into it, with two 
entrances on different sides, and a charming 
little oriel-window shaded by trees. Curi- 
ously enough they had never happened to 
dismount and explore the opposite exit, but 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


ii 


it was on the outer wall just beyond this 
that the hieroglyphics were said to be. 

Truly it was a strange sensation, in that 
lonely spot, as they came out of the second 
entrance and crept carefully along the steep 
bluff overgrown with underbrush, to look up 
at the natural wall of rock towering above 
them, and see, clearly outlined on the space 
where it must have been singularly difficult 
to work at all, the crude and curious efforts 
of Indian drawing, and the full-length, life- 
size figure of a recumbent Indian chief. 

There were many resources besides the 
never-failing ponies : hammocks and piazzas, 
lawn tennis, a piano, and a billiard-room. 
Of the ladies, one was musical, and gave 
them long evenings of delicious restfulness; 
one was artistic, and preserved for them in 
the amber of her brush the delicate hue and 
fragile texture of the flowers that else they 
could have carried away with them only in 
memory; and one was literary, and kept 
them in the latest books and freshest maga- 
zines from New York; while one was a 
“reserve fund,” drawn upon in every emer- 
gency. Then, for culture, there was the Pro- 


12 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


fessor, the genial, absorbed Professor, filling 
even the least scientific with something of 
his own enthusiasm for the splendid fossils 
of the region, the superb impressions of 
leaves, and the fossil shells picked up two 
thousand miles from either ocean. Who of 
them will ever forget the day when the first 
and only nautilus was found, just as they 
had decided that there were only clam 
shells ; or the finding of the shark’s tooth? 

For those who sought in nature “no 
charm unborrowed from the eye,” there was 
fun enough in collecting the “ freaks,” the 
queer shapes into which accident had 
molded the soft rock — shoes, boots, stock- 
ings, match-safes, and trinkets. Once a 
perfect sheep’s head, even to the eyes, was 
picked up, like a curious bas-relief, not 
twenty feet from the front door. 

By this time I can conceive of the gentle 
reader’s saying, “ I thought it was a sheep 
ranch ? ” in the tone of voice employed by 
Miss Betsy Trotwood when she asked, “ Why 
do you call it a Rookery ? I don’t see any 
rooks.” Sheep there were, indeed ; thousands 
of them. 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


13 


“ What is that stone wall ? ” asked, one 
afternoon, a lady sitting on the piazza with 
her opera-glass. 

“ That stone wall, madam,” answered a 
Harvard graduate, politely, “ is the sheep 
coming in to the corral.” 

To see the sheep go in and out, night and 
morning, was a never-failing amusement. 
Sometimes the ladies wandered down to the 
corrals at sunset to see the herds come in, and 
you would have supposed them to be wait- 
ing for a Fourth-of-July procession with 
banners, from the eagerness with which they 
exclaimed, “ Oh, here they come ! there they 
are ! ” as the first faint tinkling of the bells 
was heard in the distance. If two herds ap- 
peared at once from opposite directions, the 
one with lambs had the “ right of way,” and 
Sly, the sheep-dog — not the only commander 
who has controlled troops by sitting down in 
front of them — would hold the other herd in 
check till the lambs were safely housed. The 
lambs born on the prairie during the day 
frisked back at night to the corral beside 
their mothers, a lamb four hours old being 
able to walk a mile. 


14 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


When shearing-time came, they went into 
the sheds expecting to see the thick wool 
fall in locks beneath the shears, like the 
golden curls of their own darlings ; great was 
the amazement to -see the whole woolly fleece 
taken off much as if it had been an overcoat, 
looking still, if it were rolled up in a ball, like 
a veritable sheep, and often quite as large as 
the shorn and diminished creature that had 
once been part of it. One very hot day they 
braved the heat themselves for the sake of 
going out on the prairie to see how sheep 
keep cool. Instead of scattering along the 
creek, seeking singly the shade of the bushes 
or the tall trees only to be found near the 
creek, they huddle together in the middle of 
the sunny field more closely than ever, hang 
their heads in the shadow of one another’s 
bodies, and remain motionless for hours. 
Not a single head is to be seen as you 
approach the herd ; only a broad level field 
of woolly backs, supported by a small forest 
of little legs. 

“ Like a banyan-tree,” remarked Admetus. 

A large part of the satisfaction of these 
simple pleasures was the charm of finding 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


15 


that they could be happy with such simple 
pleasures. To discover that you can not only 
live without the opera, but that you are 
really better amused than you ever were with 
the opera at your command, gives a sense of 
satisfaction with yourself very potent in the 
element of content. Yet they were not 
without their social excitements and their 
adventures. One Harvard graduate attracts 
another, and within a radius of thirty miles 
quite a colony of personal friends has formed 
itself, whose gatherings for little dinners or 
dances, tennis or whist, are most enjoyable. 
A hundred guests were entertained at Monte 
Carneiro alone “ in the season ranch friends 
from all over the county, Eastern friends 
“ stopping over ” on their way to Colorado, or 
California, or Japan, and some who had 
learned even then that to “ see the ranch ” 
was really quite worth the trouble of two 
days and three nights in a Pullman car. 

They thought little of driving or riding 
fifteen miles to a “neighbor’s” for lunch- 
eon — always provided, however, that they 
knew the way. To frhd the way for your- 
self to a new ranch across the prairie, or to 


1 6 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

drive any where after dark, is a feat only 
attempted by the unwary. “ Love will 
find out a way” through bolts and bars and 
parental interdiction; but Love itself would 
be baffled on the prairie, where the whole 
universe stretches in endless invitation, and 
where there is absolutely “ nothing to hin- 
der ” from going in any direction that you 
please. “ Foller a kind of a blind trail, one 
mile east and two miles south,” is the kind 
of direction usually given in the vernacular; 
and so closely does one cultivate the powers 
of observation in a country where a bush 
may be a feature of the landscape, and a tall 
sunflower a landmark, that I am tempted to 
copy verbatim the written directions sent by 
a friend by which we were to find our way 
to her hospitable home : 

“Cross the river at the Howards’; turn 
to the right, and follow a dim trail till you 
come to the plowed ground, which you 
follow to the top of the hill. Follow the 
road on the west side of a corn field, and 
then a dim trail across the prairie to a wire 
fence. After you leave the wire fence, go 
up a little hill and 'down a little hill, then 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 17 

up another till you reach a road leading to 
the right, which angles across a section and 
leads into a road going south to Dr. Read’s 
frame house with a wall of sod about it. 
Through his door-yard, and then through 
some corn. Leave the road after driving 
through the corn, and angle to the right to 
the corner of another corn field. Take the 
road to the west of this corn, and go south, 
up a hill, then turn to the right and follow 
a plain road west ; afterward south, past 
Mr. Dever’s homestead, a frame house on 
the right with a stone house unroofed. 
South, past a corn field and plowed land 
on the right. The road turns to the right, 
toward the west, for a little way, then south, 
then a short distance east, and you reach 
the guide post, which is near a thrifty look- 
ing farm owned by Mr. Bryant ; a frame 
house, corn field, wheat stacks, and melon 
patch. At the guide post take the road 
going south, with a corn field on the right, 
till you come to two roads. Follow the 
right hand road (a dim trail at first) down 
the hill, past some hay stacks, to the Osage- 
orange hedge. Follow that to the creek 


1 8 . THE STORY OF A RANCH . 

crossing, then through the grove of sun- 
flowers to a sod house. Go through the 
corn directly west, following the creek to the 
crossing near our house.” 

The distance was sixteen miles, but we 
took the letter with us, and found the way 
without the slightest difficulty, though a 
little puzzled at first by finding that “ at the 
Howards’ ” meant any where within three 
miles of the Howards’. 

As for adventures, some of them were 
thrilling. First, there was the rattlesnake 
under the piazza, its presence announced by 
the innocent Baby, who complained of it as 
disturbing his play, and “ whistlin' wid its 
tail." Then Admetus lost his way upon the 
prairie after dark, and after two or three 
hours of riding in a circle, found on hasten- 
ing to a friendly lighted window for infor- 
mation that by accident he had ridden up to 
his own front door. The Enthusiast had 
once ridden seven miles with his wife to 
make an afternoon call, only to find on their 
return that the creek had risen mysteriously 
so that it would be impossible to cross. A 
herd of sheep with the herder and a friend 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


*9 


were waiting quietly at the same spot, with- 
in five minutes’ walk of the house, if they 
could only cross. “ You stay with the sheep,” 

said E , to his friend, “ and C and I 

will ride down to find a better crossing.” 
They rode five miles , and of course by the 
time they had retraced the five on the other 
bank it was too dark for their friend to 
attempt the same course. There was noth- 
ing to do but camp out for the night, with 
the bright windows of home shining just 
across the creek. Ropes were thrown over, 
supper and blankets slung across to the 
sufferers, and in the morning the creek had 
fallen again. 

Then there were the grasshoppers. If 
you are quite sure that they are not intend- 
ing to “ light,” a flight of grasshoppers is a 
beautiful thing to see. All day they floated 
over us; millions upon millions upon mil- 
lions of airy little creatures, with their white 
gauzy wings spread to the light, mounting 
steadily toward the sun, as it seemed. It 
was like a snow-storm in sunshine, if you 
can picture such a thing, with the flakes ris- 
ing instead of falling. 


20 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


The most terrible experience came with 
the least warning. It had been a lovely day, 
and the ladies were dressing for a tea at 
Elk Horn Ranch, four miles away, when 
some one exclaimed, “ What a curious 
cloud ! ” 

A perfectly cylindrical cloud, seemingly 
not more than two feet in diameter, reached 
perpendicularly from the sky to the earth. 
The ladies grew a little anxious, as it did 
not change its aspect, but the Enthusiast, 
who had lived through one cyclone, and 
knew the signs, said, carelessly, as he saun- 
tered up the avenue : 

“ Oh, you need not fear any thing in that 
shape ! That is only a rain-cloud ; no wind 
in that. A cyclone is spiral ; very wide at 
the top, and tapering down to a mere point, 
as if it were boring into the earth. It’s a 
horrid thing to see.” 

As he spoke, the cloud in question, as if 
mocking his depreciation of its power, be- 
gan assuming the very shape described. 

“It is a cyclone!” he said, quietly, but 
with whitening cheek. “You had better get 
your things. It is twenty-five miles away, 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


21 


but if the wind should change, it would be 
upon us in five minutes.” 

He shouted to the men at the corrals. 
Those who were busy in the wool-house 
came to the door, glanced at the sky, but 
went quietly back again. As one of them 
expressed it later, “ If it was a-comin’, I 
don’t believe the spring-house would save 
us, and if it wasn’t cornin’, we might as well 
finish the work.” 

The “ things ” which they were to secure 
received the usual foolish interpretations. 
A ran for a shawl to wrap baby in, be- 
fore she secured baby himself ; F ran 

to her chamber for a pocket-book with a 
precious fifty cents in it ; some one won- 
dered if she would not have time to change 
her boots, it was such a pity to wet her new 
ones running through the grass, for the rain 
was now falling heavily. The Enthusiast 
himself put on his best coat, laid out for the 
“tea,” and insisted that his wife should add 
to her incomplete toilet the touches of lace 
and jewels. “ Why, my dear, you may never 
see your things again,” was his explanation ; 
but whether he hoped to rescue the things 


22 


THE STOR V OF A RANCH. 


that were put on, or whether he was anxious 
for the family to be found beautifully dressed 
in case they were buried beneath the ruins, 
was not at all clear. 

It had been previously arranged that in 
case of cyclone they were to run to the 
spring-house. To the feminine mind the 
cellar presented greater attractions ; but the 
very strength and size of the great stone 
house would make it a terrible mass of ruins 
if it were blown over, and if it came in the 
path of the cyclone, its walls would be but a 
shaving before it. The small spring-house 
was built into a hill, and it was confidently 
hoped that cyclones would blow over it, in- 
stead of blowing it over. 

A marked precursor of a cyclone is the 
appearance of the sky. It is not darkly 
terrible ; it may even be of a clear and per- 
fect blue, and the clouds may be dazzlingly 
white ; but they shape themselves into im- 
mense cobble-stones, till the heavens look 
like an inverted pavement ; what adds to the 
strangeness of this appearance is the appa- 
rent weight of the distinct, oval, egg-shaped 
clouds ; it is impossible to conceive of them 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


23 


as ever dissipating in gentle rain or even 
hail ; if they fall you feel that each one will 
fall heavily, crushing with terrible cruelty 
every thing beneath it. 

For an hour they watched and waited. 
Then the water-spout began to fade, and 
the cobble-stones disappeared. The horses 
were ordered, and the ladies finished their 
toilets, while the Baby was heard to mur- 
mur, in a tone of disappointment, “ Papa, 
you said you were going to take me to the 
spring-house.” 

And at last they saw a genuine prairie 
fire. 

“ What are your precautions against 
fire ? ” Admetus had asked a few days be- 
fore. 

“ Such as will delight your homoeopathic 
soul,” answered the Enthusiast. “ A can of 
kerosene and a bundle of matches to set 
back fires with, though the fire-guards of 
plowed ground that you have seen all 
round the ranch are the ounce of prevention, 
better than any cure. Then we always keep 
a hogshead full of water at the stable, ready 
for carting to the spot.” 


24 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


“A hogshead of water! What good can 
a hogshead of water do against a prairie 
fire ? ” 

“Oh, we don’t put it on with a hose, I 
assure you. My imagination gasps at the 
conception of managing a prairie fire with 
a hose. We dip old blankets and old 
clothes in it, or boughs of trees if we can 
get them, and beat the fire down with 
them.” 

The illustration followed soon. All day 
smoke had been drifting over Carneiro, and 
at night-fall the scouts reported that the 
whole force had better be put on. The 
“ whole force ” at the moment consisted of 
about twenty men who had just come in to 
supper, and who started at once in wagons 
and on horseback. Ponies were ordered 
after dinner for the entire household, even 
the ladies riding far enough to have a view 
of the exciting scene. There were no tum- 
bling walls or blazing buildings, and there 
was no fear of lives being lost in upper 
stories; but there were miles upon miles, 
acres upon acres, of low grass burning like a 
sea of fire, while in the twilight shadows 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


25 


could be seen men galloping fiercely on 
swift ponies, while the slow wagons crept 
painfully, lest the precious water should be 
spilled, from every homestead, each with its 
one pitiful hogshead. It seemed incredible 
that such a mass of flame could ever be put 
out by such a handful of workers ; and it 
was only, indeed, by each man’s laboring 
steadily at his own arc of the great circle, 
trusting blindly that others were at work on 
the other side, as of course they always 
were, that the lurid scene darkened down at 
last. 

As the season advanced, interest in the 
great crops almost overshadowed that in the 
“stock.” The wild flowers had faded away, 
and no wonder, poor things ! In their inno- 
cent joy at being admired — for none but 
sheep-men had ever visited- the ranch before 
the ladies came, and what sheep-man ever 
stopped to look at a flower? — they had 
crowded close up to the front door, and 
sprung up under the very horses’ feet, vying 
with one another for the honor of being worn 
at a lady’s belt, or painted on a panel, or 
pressed in a herbarium to be sent to the 


2 6 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


cultured East, or chosen to adorn an 
aesthetic parlor. But they had had quite 
enough of it, and had grown shy and sensi- 
tive. We can not believe that they will 
ever bloom at Carneiro in just such profu- 
sion again. They have crept away to more 
deserted places, and mayhap the day will 
come when they will only bloom for us in 
stately greenhouses, at a cost that shall 
insure for their loveliness respect as well as 
admiration. 

But we hardly missed them, as the great 
grain fields took their places, and covered 
the land with the green shimmering of corn, 
the pale yellow of the wheat, the golden 
russet of rye, the stately rows of sorghum, 
like glorified cat-o’-nine-tails, the great pearly 
clusters of the rice-corn bending with their 
weight of rich loveliness, and, most beautiful 
of all, the golden millet. You do not know 
what millet is ? Ah, no ! but then you do 
not know what Kansas is. You do not 
know what it is to own a winding creek that 
would be worth its weight in gold to the 
commissioners of Central Park if they could 
buy it. You do not know what it is to have 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 27 

your landscape gardening done for you with- 
out a gardener. 

And as the harvests were gathered in, the 
great labor-saving machines were as good as 
a circus : the “ header,” leaving all the 
stubble standing in the field, cutting off only 
the heads of the grain, which then walked 
solemnly up an inclined plane only to throw 
themselves from the top in despair into the 
wagon that rolled alongside ; the “ thresher,” 
with its circular treadmill for a dozen horses, 
with their master on a revolving platform in 
the center, from which he controlled them 
with his long-lashed whip ; and the graceful 
“ go-devil ” rake, traveling idly over the hay 
fields and gathering up the hay with all the 
ease of a lady’s carpet-sweeper. 

This was the true glory of the year. At 
the Eakt, people were hurrying back from 
the sea-shore or mountains ; for them the 
summer was over and the harvest ended ; 
but for us it had just begun. Some of us 
took the wonderful trip to Colorado — for we 
were only twelve hours from Denver — and 
some of us took to shooting prairie chicken : 
but all of us were out-of-doors every day and 


28 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


all day long. Now began the season of the 
famous little duck suppers, when six or 
eight of us would start for a friend’s ranch 
to spend the night, taking the precaution to 
eat our duck that night for fear the gentle- 
men wouldn't shoot any the next morning, 
but returning the next day laden with the 
spoils of the victors, shot in the cool gray of 
the misty dawn. Now it was that the En- 
thusiast discovered a method of rousing his 
rebellious comrades to the early breakfast 
that he himself affected : stationing himself 
in the billiard-room, he had only to shout, 
“ Gentlemen, nineteen duck in the pond ! ” 
and in five minutes every man of the house- 
hold, from the geological professor and the 
elegant young man from Chicago down to 
the boy who was “ going to have ” a gun 
next year, could be seen rushing do^vn the 
hill in habiliments that brought back to 
these graduates of Harvard reminiscences of 
an early call to prayers. 

And then it was in October that the 
Griffin came. 

“ Why, he’s nothing but a gentleman ! ” 
exclaimed the Baby, who had insisted on 


THE STOR V OF A RANCH. 


29 


going to the station, with many inquiries as 
to whether the expected arrival, which he 
took to be a flock of some rare kind of lambs, 
would be conveyed to the house “ on legs 
or in wagons ? ” . 

I feel called upon to chronicle the noble 
zeal with which the Griffin immediately at- 
tacked his official duties. He did, indeed, 
wait a few minutes to assuage the pangs of 
hunger with coffee and beefsteak ; but al- 
most immediately he remarked that it was a 
glorious day for sketching, and he must not 
lose such an opportunity. The ladies who 
put up the luncheon noticed that several 
gentlemen who had never been addicted to 
brush or pencil proposed to join this sketch- 
ing expedition, and that the sketching ma- 
terials seemed to consist largely of guns and 
cartridges; but the “studies’' of prairie- 
chicken, duck, plover, and quail, “ taken 
from life,” which they brought back with 
them, made so valuable an addition to the 
next evening’s dinner that no explanation 
was required, and no complaint made of a 
day of prolonged feminine solitude. 

And the landscape only grew lovelier. 


30 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


The flowers had faded, and the great grain 
fields had been swept away ; but the wild 
beautiful prairie, taking on the tawny color- 
ing dear to the artist, with here and there a 
broad belt or mantle of the brilliant low red 
sumac, grew ever dearer. For the first time 
in my life I understood Emily Bronte’s pas- 
sion for her desolate brown moors. There 
is rare charm in a sense of isolation that you 
do not feel to be loneliness. And for the 
very reason that the undulating prairie offers 
so few salient points, the picture appeals to 
the eye and lingers in the mind more effec- 
tively than many a more impressive scene. 
The “ values ” count ; every stroke “ tells.” 

The identity of interests between master 
and men is a pleasant feature of ranch life. 
Occasionally, of course, there will be a dis- 
affected laborer, who may even work up 
matters to a concentrated “ strike but as a 
rule the men are happy and contented, proud 
of the ranch, and devoted to its success. 
They have their own cook at their own 
“ quarters,” from which in the evening come 
cheerful strains of Moody and Sankey or of 
native jollity, the chorus being, 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 31 

“Oh, I’m a jolly herder, 

I want you for to know ! 

I herd the sheep for Wellington — 

For Wellington and Co.” 

When we asked a man who was putting 
“ bunks ” into a small house for some of the 
men to sleep in why he hadn’t taken a larger 
one opposite, he replied, dryly : 

“ Oh, this one ain’t near nice enough for 
the hens ; so we took it. The hens are to 
have the other one.” 

There is something very enjoyable in the 
consciousness not only of controlling the 
movements of forty or fifty men, but of car- 
ing for all their interests, mental, physical, 
and moral. The men with families have 
separate houses, and to supply them with 
literature, see that their groceries are good, 
cure their sick children, and in fact adminis- 
ter every thing they need from advice to 
flannel, is not only an intense moral satisfac- 
tion to the ladies of the household with a 
taste for benevolence, but a source of much 
entertainment. Think, O blast philanthro- 
pists, of getting up a Christmas tree for chil- 
dren who never saw one ! A regarded 


32 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


as one of her pleasantest experiences of the 
summer the opportunity afforded her to 
make converts to homoeopathy. 

“ You are as proud of having cured that 
child,” remarked the Enthusiast, one day, 
“as if your little sugar pills had really done 
it some good.” 

“ Oh, no,” said the lady, “I’m not proud 
of having cured it ; I’m thankful for not 
having killed it. What is it, James? ” as a 
new applicant presented himself. 

“ If you please, marm, I’d like some more 
medicine ; the baby’s almost well.” 

The delighted homceopathist, on the alert 
for “ symptoms,” proposed to change the 
prescription. 

“ Oh, no, marm ; I wouldn’t make no 
change if I was you. Them other little pills 
was just boss.” 

Some of us, however, still think that she 
owed her converts to the fact that she never 
sent in any bills. 

“ Why, I paid that other fellow fifty cents 
for just one pill!” said the grateful recipi- 
ent of medicine for ailments described as 
follows; “Well, my throat’s sore, and my 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


33 


back aches, and my stomach’s gi’n out, and 
my head’s bad, and I don’t feel very well 
myself .” 

What were our deprivations ? Really, at 
the moment, I can not recall any. We had 
no “ set tubs,” but then we had no washing- 
day; once a week one of the teams going 
every day to Ellsworth took all the washing 
into town, where it was excellently done at 
the rate of thirty-seven cents a dozen, includ- 
ing the embroidered white dresses. We had 
no gas; but were we not using a duplex 
burner in our New York parlors, and carry- 
ing candles to our bed-chambers as the high- 
est tribute to aestheticism ? We had no 
door-bell ; but do you know how pleasant it 
is not to have one ? We had no mountains ; 
but in that rarer air we had countless moun- 
tain effects on the low-lying hills — one slope 
crimson with the reflected glory of a superb 
sunset long after the others lay in violet 
shadow. We had no sea, but strangely 
enough, of nothing is the prairie so suggest- 
ive as of the sea ; no Eastern visitor ever 
failed to notice and to wonder at it. It 
seems incredible, but you have a constant 


34 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


impression that the sea is tossing just out of 
sight ; perhaps because of doors and windows 
thrown wide open all day long to the soft 
glare of utterly unshaded sunshine, only tol- 
erable on the prairie or at the sea-shore ; per- 
haps because of the low murmur of the wind 
behind the hills, like the ceaseless monotone 
of surf. “ Papa, it’s just like the Point Road,” 
was the criticism of one of the children as 
we drove rapidly across a favorite section — 
the “ Point Road ” being a drive of six miles 
along the sea, to which he had always been 
accustomed in summer. 

A brisk walk on a cool morning or even- 
ing up and down the long and wide -piazza, 
roofed over only at the porch, was pro- 
nounced by the Europeans fully equal to a 
promenade on the Atlantic steamers, and 
the gentleman who had hesitated longest 
over the temporary parting from the yacht 
of his friend the Millionaire declared the 
scene to be fully equal to the deck of the 
Peerless, as he lay in the hammock swung 
gently by the cool clear breeze, with that 
moan of surf out of sight, the stars overhead, 
and the flagstaff over the porch creaking 


THE STORY OF A RANCH 


35 


slightly in the wind like straining cordage. 
We had no groves, but there were plenty of 
trees, tall, beautiful elms, following the curves 
of the creeks. In other words, there were 
plenty of trees to look at , but we could al- 
ways see over, or beyond, or through them, 
so that when, on our return trip to the East, 
we began to catch glimpses of prettily shaded 
lawns and cottages shut in by woods in the 

suburbs of Cincinnati, M expressed the 

feelings of us all, when she said, wondering- 
ly, “Somehow I’m not half so glad to see 
trees again, as I thought I should be.” We 
could not talk about the “ lawn,” or the 
“garden,” or the “woods,” but we soon 
knew the numbers of the sections by heart, 
so that we understood, when we asked the 
whereabouts of a new flower or fossil, if we 
were told that it had been found “ over in 
Seven.” “ Ah ! ” said the lady of Elk Horn 
one day, “ you ought to come over and spend 
the night, just to see Twenty-one by moon- 
light.” 

But was it hot ? 

Certainly it was hot by the thermometer ; 
but at the great elevation the heat was not 


36 THE STOR V OF A RANCH. 

felt to be so excessive as a lesser degree of 
it at home. Hardly a night did we sleep 
without a blanket, and there were evenings 
in August when it was too cool to sit on the 
piazza after dinner. Children play fearlessly 
bare-headed in the sun on the hottest days, 
and it is said that there has never been a 
case of sunstroke in Kansas. It was not a 
rare thing for us to drive into town in an 
open carriage, with the thermometer at ioo°, 
and without a particle of shade any of the 
way, the high wind making even parasols 
and broad-brimmed hats an impossibility. 

As for our menu, I am glad of an oppor- 
tunity to explain that the proverbial bacon 
and salt pork of the West have a raison 
d'etre not suspected at the East. With 
chickens a dollar and a half a dozen, eggs 
ten cents a dozen, butter fifteen cents a 
pound, and quail, plover, duck, and prairie- 
chicken to be had for the shooting, the ap- 
petite of ranchmen becomes so satiated with 
what in New York would be the delicacies 
of the season, as to crave the stimulus of a 
bit of delicate bacon dr a slice of rosy 
ham. 


the stor y of a ranch. 


37 


And now one word of warning. If you 
would see Kansas as we saw it, you must 
see it where we saw it. We refuse to be 
responsible for the Kansas seen from the 
car windows, in a frame of mind bordering 
on. exasperation at the maddening slowness 
of a train of cars conscious of being a 
monopoly, and dragging its slow length 
along through a country so horribly level 
that you feel as if it would be some relief to 
spring to your feet and recite “ Excelsior.” 
No ; you must leave the cars and the rail- 
road and the dismal little railroad towns, and 
find your way to the big ranches where life 
and work are one long holiday. Should you 
choose Monte Carneiro, the Enthusiast will 
show you his corrals, and drive you round 
his corn fields ; you can shoot your own 
quail for dinner, have a game of tennis and 
a siesta in the hammock after luncheon, and 
a game of billiards after dinner ; then, as the 
little maid brings in the tray of tea, you can 
saunter into a parlor with great broad 
windows, full of rugs and portieres and screens 
of Kensington embroidery, and the lady who 
pours your tea will afterward sing for you 


* 


38 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

Schubert’s “ Serenade,” or “ I know that my 
Redeemer liveth.” This is not the popular 
conception of ranch life ; nor is it, I confess, 
the common mode of ranch life. Too many 
young ranchmen, eager to put all their 
capital into stock, think they can “ manage ” 
to live “ any way ” for a few years, and 
remain too long contented with ham and 
bacon in a “dug-out”; but the little knot 
of friends who have gathered about Ells- 
worth believe that to make their homes not 
only comfortable but luxurious, to live not 
only decently but aesthetically, to have not 
only a parlor but portieres, is as much 
for their business interest as Tiffany un- 
doubtedly considers his high rent and plate- 
glass windows. 

Then, as your host steps out on the piazza 
to haul down the American flag — his only 
method of locking up for the night — you 
will catch a glimpse of the shifting lights 
of a train on the Union .Pacific, pleasantly 
suggestive of a post-office, with two mails 
from the east and two from the west every 
day, a railroad station and telegraph office, 
within two miles. In the moonlight you 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH 


39 


can see the stablemen carefully housing 
for the night the choice Jersey and Swiss 
cattle ; for our firm is quite too recently 
from New York to have lost its faith in 
blood and pedigree. Not yet has it been 
seriously affected by the western passion 
for numbers rather than for quality, for 
so many “head” rather than so many 
“ registered.” Ten thousand sheep and five 
hundred cattle they will have, of course ; but 
the Enthusiast insists upon “ pure Atwoods,” 
while the Millionaire and the Man of Leisure 
would scorn to belong to any firm that did 
not appreciate “registered ” Jerseys. 

When at last you seek the little Eastlake 
bedroom, it will be, I think, with the inten- 
tion of leaving for the east by the earliest 
morning train ; only, however, that you may 
gather together your Lares and Penates to 
return to Kansas soon as possible, that 
you too may become an early settler before 
it is too late. 



PART II. 


WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE 
INTRODUCTION. 

I. 

I T began, not with buying a ranch, but 
with selling one. 

Forthe Major, who had been spending the 
winter with the Enthusiast at Elk Horn, 
asked one morning in the spring as they were 
strolling up to the house from the corrals, 

“ What will you take for the ranch? ” 
“We don’t want to sell.” 

“ I know you don’t. But every man has 
his price. What is yours ? ” 

“ thousand dollars,” laughed the 

Enthusiast, naming a sum which he knew 
his friend would think preposterous. 

“ Very well ; I will take it.” 

“ But, Major,” gasped the astonished 


42 


THE STOR V OF A RANCH. 


senior partner of the Elk Horn firm, “ I 
didn’t mean it, you know ! We never meant 
to sell it ; we don’t want to sell it ! I only 
named that sum because I didn’t suppose you 
would pay it.” 

“ I understand. You have a right to ask 
a high price for what you don’t want to sell. 
But I suppose I have a right to pay a high 
price for what I do want to buy. So 1 take 
you at your word. Is it a bargain ? ” 

“ But we like Elk Horn so much ! ” 

“ So do I.” 

“ And we don’t want to leave Ellsworth 
County.” 

“ Neither do I.” 

“ But what shall we do ? where 'can we 
go?” 

“ Buy another ranch near by and make it 
what you have made this. Come now ; think 
what a privilege it will be to have us out here 
as permanent neighbors.” 

This was certainly a point to cheer the de- 
pressed senior partner, who had not at all the 
air of a man who has just been offered a 
larger sum for his article than he would have 
thought of asking for it in serious earnest. 


THE S TOR Y OF A RANCH. 


43 


Youth and energy are apt to recover quickly 
from the blow of having several thousand 
dollars forced upon them, and before the two 
young men reached the house, they were al- 
most equally jubilant ; one at having bought, 
the other at having sold, the much-coveted 
Elk Horn ranch. 

It was just two years since the young 
senior partner had left the east, ignorant 
where he was to settle, knowing only that he 
hated the law, that he was equally tired of 
the work he had to do and of the work he 
could not find to do, that he had been asked 
to join a party going west on investigation, 
and that a generous friend had said, “ Go by 
all means, and I will see you through.” 

All summer the little party had traveled, 
determined not to settle any where till they 
had seen every thing. Friends at the east, 
and they themselves at first, had been in fa- 
vor of the wonderful north-west where the 
winters are so mild that the herds graze all 
the year round ; but investigation proved 
that about once in six, eight or ten years, a 
terrific snow-storm, entirely unexpected and 
unprovided for, undid the work of several 


44 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


mild and fortunate winters. A little snow, 
carefully guarded against, they were sure 
would be less dangerous than no snow with 
a frightful storm when you least expected it. 
There was little enough snow any where ; 
even in Kansas, ranchmen made little provis- 
ion against it ; but our party were convinced 
that considerable expense in the matter of 
sheds would prove a saving in the end ; a 
conviction which I may as well state here as 
any where else has been amply proved true 
by their experience. They were having a 
capital time, “ roughing it ; ” traveling by 
day with their own horses and wagon, not 
without some exhilarating scares from the 
Indians, camping out at night in the tent 
they carried with them, or entering perhaps 
some small cabin with the friendly notice on 
the door: “ Coffee and bacon in the closet; 
shut the door when you leave.” But they 
were a little discouraged. Nothing seemed 
permanently desirable. 

Till they struck Ellsworth County in Kan- 
sas. What friendly eagle perched on their 
standard here, or what lone animal wander- 
ing before them paused a moment to partake 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH 


45 


of buffalo grass, or what other oracles they 
consulted, is not known. Possibly these 
young gentlemen fresh from Harvard 
adopted the Virgilian method, and on the 
day they found themselves reduced to eating 
their plates, or in other words serving their 
bacon on a bit of bread and then eating the 
bread, decided that thus the gods made 
manifest their will toward them. Certainly 
to the uneducated eye, — it being remem- 
bered that in western parlance the unedu- 
cated eye is simply the eye that does not 
know a ranch when it sees one, — there was 
little reason for choosing Kansas rather than 
Colorado, or Ellsworth County, instead of 
Russell or Saline County. There was the 
same prairie, — not indeed a dead level, but 
pleasantly undulating, — the same brownish 
grass, the same no-trees, the same prairie- 
dogs, the same air : very little to seem at- 
tractive or promising to the New England 
intellect, bred under the great elms of Cam- 
bridge. But our young gentlemen were wise 
in their generation ; they had not flown over 
great tracts of unexamined country on the 
wings of the railway, trusting to what they 


4 6 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


could see by exploring the vicinity of little 
towns a hundred miles apart. They had gone 
over every foot of the ground, and they noted 
immediately that Ellsworth County, Kansas, 
was beautifully watered, and that its creeks 
were heavily timbered. At least, I suppose 
they did ; I know these facts to be true, and 
I really can not think of any thing else that 
would seem at first sight to justify the im- 
pulsive instinct of these young prospective 
ranchmen. I only know that it proved a 
true one, and that all the other bees attracted 
since to this same honey, have never found 
it fail them. 

It was settled, then, that they would 
locate in Ellsworth County, and that they 
would understand their business practically. 
For seven months they lived with a fellow- 
ranchman of many years’ experience, herd- 
ing their own sheep and making themselves 
masters of every detail. So it happened 
that when at last the “ firm ” was organized, 
and well established on its own ranch, and 
the shearers “ struck,” they were able to say 
confidently, 

“ You can leave if you wish to.” 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


47 


And the shearers left ; laughing in their 
sleeves at the probable helplessness of these 
confident “ tenderfeet.” But the three 
members of the firm went to work manfully, 
and sheared every one of their flock, not so 
large, then, it is true, as the great herd 
feeding now in detachments on the grass of 
Monte Carneiro. It took them some time, 
and they did not enjoy it. They would 
gladly have paid the difference, except that 
a principle was at stake. The matter was 
settled once for all : the senior partner of 
the Elk Horn farm was a “boss" not to be 
trifled with. To this day the “ three cheers 
for the boss ! ” which the men never fail to 
give when the young master enters the “ quar- 
ters” at early dawn with a cheerful “ Give 
me a cup of your coffee, boys ; they’re not 
up yet at the house,” after one of the 
“ emergency ” nights when from snow or 
rain or cold the entire force has been up all 
night, is due not only to a sense of friendli- 
ness of the “ boss,” but to the knowledge 
that if trouble arose he would be “ boss.” 

Then came a year of exhilarating hard 
work. At the end of it, the senior partner 


48 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


felt justified in going back for a little lady 
in Boston, who had promised, while he was 
a Harvard student, to love, honor and obey 
him as soon as he should be firmly estab- 
lished in the law, and who had not retracted 
this promise of a promise on discovering 
that her lawyer was to be a ranchman. There 
had been only congratulations and encour- 
agement and God-speed for the young man ; 
but there were many forebodings and much 
condolence for the young lady. Some of us 
smiled when we saw her putting into her 
trunks long soft cashmere gowns, cut square 
in the neck, and with, as it seemed, a little 
longer train than usual, and one of us 
asked, 

“ What will you do when the servant 
walks into the dining-room and expects to 
-sit at the table with you ?” 

“ I don’t know.” 

What she did do, when the momentous 
question, enough to make the stoutest heart 
quail, arose, was to invite the junior partner 
to take his dinner in a napkin and go out with 
the herd to lunch “ on the range.” This may 
not seem to have a direct bearing on the 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


49 


difficulty ; but it enabled the lady of the 
house to say carelessly, the first time Jane 
was to lay the table, 

“By the way, Jane, you need only lay 
three plates to-day ; there are usually four 
of us, but Mr. B is not at home to- 

day.” 

There was a momentary amazement on 
the part of Jane, but no murmur of surprise 
or rebellion. She quietly laid the three 
“ covers ” and retired to the kitchen. The 
terrible question was settled forever in Ells- 
worth County ; ladies coming from the east 
with “ prejudices ” would be able to keep 
their prejudices, if they knew how. 

And because much of my object in writing 
this story of a ranch is to show that ladies 
accustomed to every eastern luxury can be 
both comfortable and happy on a ranch, I may 
as well state here that the young lady with the 
soft cashmere gowns, who had never known 
any thing but city life at the east and who 
had been brought up “ in Boston,” has never 
known a day of homesickness on the prairie. 
Her two fortes were music and dancing. 
She went where there were no concerts of 


5o 


THE STOR V OF A RANCH. 


any kind nearer than Denver or Kansas 
City ; she could, it is true, still dance, for 
her former incomparable partner in the ger- 
man was now her partner for life ; but then if 
she danced, there would be no one at the 
piano, and waltzing without a waltz is very 
like, — well, Bostonians out of Boston. And 
she was happy. She is still happy ; and where- 
as both she and the young lawyer tired of the 
law went west to make money more easily 
to live as they wished to live at the east, I 
doubt now whether either of them dreams 
of ever coming east again except to 
visit us. 


II. 

E VEN in that first winter of plain living 
' and considerable thinking, in the tiny 
house on the prairie, the little anxieties and 
simple incidents varied the monotony with 
constant activity. Something was always 
happening. It might be only the sudden 
dawning of a man on horseback on the 
horizon three miles away, who might turn 
out to be one’s dearest friend from Harvard 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 5 1 

and Boston, or a tramp to be entertained 
over night ; or it might be such a storm as 
came up one afternoon when the senior 
partner was away. 

He had gone to Ellsworth, nine miles 
away, that morning. If the snow began 
falling before it was time for him to leave, 
he would know enough not to trust to the 
slow-falling flakes, however few and faint 
they seemed to be. But he might have 
started ; and the thought of one alone on 
the prairie, in a blinding storm at night, was 
a heavy one to lie on a young wife’s heart. 
But there was something to do as well as to 
suffer. She knew the men ought to be at 
the corrals all night, keeping the sheep free 
from the drifting snow, for at that time they 
had not built the sheds to afford such thor- 
ough protection as they do now. They 
should relieve each other at regular hours, 
and those who came in should find hot cof- 
fee and sandwiches ready for them. All 
night she played both overseer and house- 
keeper, with anxiety sleeping in her heart; 
and when toward noon the next day the 
senior partner rode up in the dazzling sun- 


52 


THE STOR V OF A RANCH . 


shine, anxiety in every feature lest the men 
should have been careless in his absence, he 
was met by his wife r not with tears of relief 
or smiles of rejoicing over his personal safety, 
but with the triumphant assurance : 

“ I haven’t lost a sheep, not a single one ! ” 

Then, before long, came the letter from 
the east, which has changed the fortunes of 
so many of us : 

“ I must go somewhere, every winter, you 
know. As for southern sanitariums, I will 
never enter one again, and 1 have told them 
all here that I am going out to spend this 
winter with you. They alternately rave and 
weep ; remind me that the west is not the 
south ; tell me that I never can survive the 
cold, and that ‘ roughing it ’ will be worse 
than dwelling in hotel hospitals where the 
most cheerful phase of life is the possibility 
that your next-door neighbor may not cough 
quite so badly to-night as he did last night. 
But nothing could be worse. If you will 
only save me from a southern sanitarium, 
you will do me no end of a favor. I can’t 
help you, nor have any of the fun of the 
prairie fires and coyotes and all the other 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


53 


scares; I shall have to huddle up in a corner 
and take care of myself ; but all the same, I 
want to come, and I wont go south/' 

So it happened that during the second 
winter they “ took boarders " in the tiny 
house on the prairie. And in the spring the 
boarder had asked the tranquil question : 

“ What will you take for the ranch ? ” 

For although it had been the coldest and 
snowiest winter that had been known in- 
Kansas for many a year, the invalid had 
proved the truth of his faith in the high land 
and dry air of the west, weighed against the 
mild winter of the south. He had not had 
a day's illness : nor, I may as well add here, 
has he had a single lapse from health in the 
five years that have followed. Quite apart 
from the question of health, however, he and 
his wife, another Boston girl whose pleasures 
heretofore had been wholly those of society, 
declare that nothing would induce them 
now to have their permanent home any 
where else. They come east for a month or 
two every summer, but on one of these trips 
the homesick Major wrote back to the En- 
thusiast three weeks after he had left Elk 


54 THE story of a ranch. 

Horn, “ I am all ready to go back, and have 
been for three weeks ! ” 

So the Major had bought Elk Horn, and 
its former proprietors found themselves com- 
pelled to “ move on,” not because they were 
so poor but because they had grown so sud- 
denly rich. It was not in the nature of man 
to refuse an opportunity to pay back all 
their borrowed capital and start with some- 
thing ahead, but where should they go with 
it? In their perplexities the partnership 
was dissolved ; one of the young men found 
an unexpected opening at the east ; one 
found another ranch which he proposed to 
run on his own account ; and the senior 
partner, who said he could not leave Kansas 
and would not leave Ellsworth County was 
sure he should never find any thing equal to 
Elk Horn. 

But Youth and Hope triumphed over the 
struggles and disappointments of a young 
man whose friend would offer him more than 
he dared refuse for the ranch that he did not 
want to sell. Youth and Hope driving about 
the country and prospecting, came upon a 
“ range ” which they were perfectly sure, 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


55 


with the instant confidence of youth and 
hope, would prove, oh, a thousand times bet- 
ter than Elk Horn after all ! 

“ Ever so much further from the town,” 
we murmured lugubriously from the east. 

“ But ever so much nearer the railroad, 
and within two miles of a station, a post- 
office, and a telegraph-office,’’ they insisted. 

And the view ! 

And the hill ! 

And the springs of water ! 

And the three elms ! 

And the cave with the Indian hiero- 
glyphics ! 

And only four miles from Elk Horn. 

Indeed, the two “estates” would touch; 
only in a way to be represented by a pin- 
point on the map, where the corners of two 
sections came together, and the houses 
would be four miles apart ; but still they 
could call themselves neighbors. 

So it was arranged that another tiny house 
should be built at the new ranch in the 
summer, and during the summer, while the 
Major and his wife went east to gather to- 
gether their Lares and Penates even to the 


56 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


softest rug and the biggest mirror and the 
most precious bric-h-brac, for nothing in 
their eyes was to be too good for Kansas, a 
large and beautiful stone house, with piazzas, 
should be put up at Elk Horn, for which the 
original little house, where they had all had 
such good times together, should serve as 
an L. 

And after the big new house became hab- 
itable, before the Major came back to take 
possession, why would we not come out arid 
visit them ? Harry was our friend as well 
as theirs, and gave us royal permission to 
- trespass on his domain so long as we might 
choose ; why would we not come ? 

Well, we would. Poor things! it would 
cheer them up a little to have some of the 
society that they had been accustomed to. 
Yes, we would go, and carry them a whiff of 
eastern elegance and culture. Of course, it 
would be a sacrifice ; we should lose our 
summer at the seashore; the journey in the 
cars would be intolerable, and the west 
would be very nearly unendurable ; but we 
would go by way of the Great Lakes and 
the Mississippi, and we would come back 


THE STORY OF A RANCH . 


57 


by way of Colorado. There would be alle- 
viations, and at any rate, for their sakes, we 
would go. We could bear it, probably, for 
a fortnight. 

Looking back now at those early days of 
our ignorance about the west, when we 
patronized the “ poor things ” at the ranch 
with so much thoughtfulness, I am reminded 
of the lady “ from Boston ” who, only five 
years ago, sent with some books to a young 
lady in Chicago the message, “ For we at 
the center are so glad to be of any assistance 
to you who are struggling with the difficul- 
ties of frontier life ! ” 


III. 

I N July we started. Not direct for Kan- 
sas City by any means ; we would post- 
pone the “ difficulties of frontier life ” as 
long as possible, and would idle away a few 
weeks in the Lehigh Valley, at Watkins 
Glen, at Buffalo (not for the sake of Niagara, 
but because of the House Beautiful in 
Delaware Avenue), at Detroit, on the Great 


58 


THE STORY OF A RANCH 


Lakes, at Duluth, at St. Paul, at Chicago. 
Of this part of their journey I have written 
elsewhere ; but precisely the same party that 
had left New York for the Great West via 
the Great Lakes, now left Chicago in search 
of the “ frontier.” Not one had been dis- 
couraged. It was a large party, too. Numer- 
ically, I shall have to confess, they amounted 
only to two ; but in virtue of their many 
characteristics, those of one admirably sup- 
plementing those of the other, I have called 
them elsewhere the Optimist and the Man 
of Resources, the Parsimonious and the 
Extravagant, the Diligent Suggester of Un- 
necessary Articles, and the Meek Carrier of 
the same, the Romantic and the Man of 
Sense. The approach to the ranch was 
certainly circuitous and expensive, not being 
direct ; but the Parsimonious was not pay- 
ing the bills, so she did not care, and the 
Extravagant never cared. 

As a matter of fact, however, the “ diffi- 
culties of frontier life ” did begin at Chicago, 
with the intense heat. I will only remark 
of this heat that it was a day of intense si- 
lence on the part of the Optimist ; even she 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


59 


could find no excuse for it ; even she looked 
daggers at the poor Suggester of Unneces- 
sary Articles who had found her sealskin 
sacque and hood useful on Lake Superior 
and had brought them with her into the 
Pullman of the C. B. & Q. ; “it might be 
cold at night, you know.” Somewhere be- 
tween i io° and 1 1 5 0 the thermometer ranged 
that day in the cars, and if you opened a 
window, a sirocco like a blast in passing the 
open door of a furnace withered your hopes 
and suggested to the patient Optimist that 
“perhaps it was just as well not to sit in a 
draught.” 

All that mortal conductor could do to 
alleviate the situation was done : a pillow, a 

glass of water, a fan, a book was there 

any thing else that he could offer? 

“ I am afraid,” said the Romantic solemn- 
ly, “ that if I were not married, it would be 
a case of Rosamond and the conductor.” 

“ Very well, my dear,” answered the Man 
of Resources. “ This is the Land of Easy 
Divorce, and I would not for a moment 
stand in the way of your social advancement. 
I will just suggest, however, that it is barely 


6o 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


possible these amenities may be due to the 
fact that there is a rival road to Kansas City, 
and we have not purchased our return tick- 
ets. When we strike the monopolies in the 
Colorado caftons, I doubt whether you will 
find them so solicitous about your pil- 
lows.” 

“ Never mind,” said the Diligent Sug- 
gester. “ I brought an extra pillow in my 
trunk.” 

Dinner was some slight alleviation. It 
was the first time they had struck the hotel 
cars, and the novelty of having just as many 
minutes for refreshment as they chose to 
take, with the really delicate viands, — the 
ice cream and fruit, — beguiled a weary hour. 
But it was a dreadful afternoon ! Even the 
Man of Resources was tormented with try- 
ing to think what could be done for the 
engineer, facing that blazing sun the whole 
afternoon, and with no shelter from the hot 
wind. At five o’clock it was announced that 
tea was ready in the hotel car, and that the 
car would be taken off at six. 

“ O how can we have tea before the sun 
goes down? ” wailed the Romantic. 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH 


61 


The conductor regretted the stern neces- 
sity. 

“ My dear,” asked the Man of Sense 
humbly, “ will you kindly tell me the differ- 
ence between tea at five o’clock and five 
o’clock tea? If I remember rightly, five 
o’clock tea is rather an institution with us at 
home.” 

“ Five o’clock tea is tea" explained the 
Romantic with dignity. “ And tea at five 
o’clock is beefsteak and hot biscuit. Five 
o’clock tea is tea before dinner ; tea at five 
o’clock is tea after dinner. Is it possible 
that you think you could eat a hot steak?” 

Alas, no ! he had forgotten that the stern 
laws of the railway would of course compel 
them to have steak. 

“ Can’t we telegraph for supper somewhere 
on the road, later?” inquired the Man of 
Resources. 

“ Certainly, certainly ! ” answered the 
gentlemanly conductor of the C. B. & Q. 
“ You can have supper at Quincy; but we 
don’t reach Quincy before midnight.” 

“ O never mind the midnight ! ” said the 
Optimist cheerfully. 


02 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


“ And if you sit up for supper, you can 
see the Mississippi when we cross it,” added 
the conductor. 

“ He means,” explained the Romantic as 
the conductor moved away, “ that if we sit 
up to see the Mississippi, we can have some 
supper. I don’t care about the supper, for 
I have no doubt the Diligent Suggester has 
a can of tomato in her bag, but I shall cer- 
tainly sit up to see the Mississippi.” 

So it happened that long after every one 
else had retired for the night behind the 
brilliant tapestries that festooned each quiet 
section, our party passed through the long 
vista of cars between the berths, where, each 
in his narrow cell till morning laid, the rude 
forefathers of the journey slept, like Bridg- 
man’s mummy swathed in magnificence of 
oriental drapery. They had arrived at 
Quincy. The frugal meal that had been 
telegraphed for was found to consist of lem- 
onade and melons. 

“How nice and cool!” exclaimed the 
Optimist. 

“ So much better than hot things at five 
o’clock ! ” murmured the Romantic. 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 63 

“ And so reasonable ! ” added the Parsi- 
monious. 

What the Man of Sense said was inaudi- 
ble, or ought to have been ; but the Man of 
Resources demanded coffee and got it, while 
the Extravagant was heard to mutter that 
hereafter they would have two suppers ; one 
at five o'clock and one at midnight. 

They stood on the rear platform of the 
rear car, waiting to see the Mississippi, and 
as they crossed slowly a very dark river, 
murmured dutifully that it was beautiful 
and so impressive ; then turned to wend 
their way back to where their own oriental 
draperies waited to infold them. 

“ That ain’t It ! ” shouted a very small 
voice very full of scorn somewhere near 
them. “ If yer want ter see the Mississip, 
yer’ll have to wait a bit." 

And they waited, realizing the absurdity of 
their mistake as they began now to cross the 
genuine “ It," the actual “ Mississip." Here 
let me add, that whoever wishes to be prop- 
erly impressed with the width of this noble 
river, should see it by midnight from the 
rear platform of the rear car of a long train 


6 4 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


of Pullmans, when, seeing nothing ahead of 
you, and behind you only the interminable 
and ever increasing arches of the great 
bridge, growing smaller and smaller in the 
distance, till the great red light at the end 
merely glimmers like a glow-worm, you wait 
for any sign of approaching an opposite 
shore with a dazed sense of having started 
across an Atlantic ocean. 

Morning found them at Kansas City. As 
the oriental draperies were packed away, the 
Romantic suddenly exclaimed : 

“ Why, last night was the revolver night ! ” 

“Was it? ” languidly inquired the Man of 
Sense. 

“ And I do believe,” said with extreme 
emphasis the Diligent Suggester of Unnec- 
essary Articles, looking daggers, if not 
revolvers, at the Meek Carrier of the same, 
“ that you left it all night locked up in the 
bag ! ” 

“Nevermind,” said the Optimist, “as 
we haven’t been robbed. To-night I shall 
remember to hide my engagement ring ; 
that is all the jewelry I have about me to be 
anxious about,” 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


65 


“ But I — I don't want to take off my wed- 
ding ring ! ” exclaimed the Romantic, with 
a glance of piteous appeal toward the Man 
of Resources. 

She was soothed by the Man of Sense, 
who assured her that all train robberies 
(there had then been but one), always took 
place east of Kansas City, and they might 
now consider themselves out of danger. 

They had telegraphed to the ranch that 
they would arrive Saturday morning ; true, 
the telegram could not be sent nearer than 
Ellsworth, but their host might be in town 
for letters and receive it in time. Some- 
where on the road they would have to spend 
either a day or a night at a hotel ; and they 
decided that as Kansas City would be their 
last chance for city luxuries, they would wait 
tranquilly there through the dust and heat of 
the day, and go on to Ellsworth by sleeping- 
car. Their hearts almost failed them as 
they stepped from the cars, however ; even 
at that early hour of the morning, the ther- 
mometer seemed to be standing at 120° in 
the shade ; the immense goggles of the 
truckmen and hackmen showed that the 


66 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


blinding glare and whirling dust and sand 
were not accidents of the day, but an habit- 
ual affliction ; the muddy Missouri below 
them was not re-assuring, and the towering 
hill above* them on the summit of which 
they understood their hotel to be perched, 
looked to them, as a New York hotel once 
did to Dr. Holmes, like an inverted Inferno. 
But the train had gone. 

Slowly up the hill in the blinding heat 
and dazzling light they climbed in the stage, 
realizing that they had entered the country 
of magnificent distances, when they saw 
advertised on the fences: “Five million 
acres of land to be had ; apply to James 
Runley,” instead of the “ ten house-lots for 
sale ” with which they were familiar in New 
York. It added not a little to the sense of 
heat that every body in the city seemed to 
have on winter clothes. Not a thin coat or 
a light waist-coat did they see all day, and 
that the porter was in his shirt sleeves was 
the only evidence of discomfort among peo- 
ple who seemed rather proud of having the 
hottest summer for thirty years. 

The hotel was not uncomfortable ; there 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 67 

was a Greek frieze on their water-pitcher, 
and the furniture of the parlor, though 
covered with hair-cloth, was Eastlake in 
design. They were in time for a late break- 
fast, but the Romantic hesitated about 
demanding omelets and coffee from the 
noble looking y<>uth who came forward to 
wait upon them. 

“ He is certainly a Harvard graduate,” 
she said, under her breath ; “ and I feel as if 
I were ordering about my cousin or my 
brother.” 

It was their first, but not their last, ex- 
perience of the kind. After breakfast, as 
the Extravagant sauntered to the office to 
send another telegram, a workman ap- 
proached, set down his tools, and called for 
a blank. He wrote with such evident ease, 
and handed across the counter such a beau- 
tiful specimen of handwriting, that the Man 
of Sense inquired of the clerk : 

“Is that man a carpenter?” 

“Yes, sir; the house carpenter. Can he 
do any thing for you?” 

“ I see how it is,” explained the Man of 
Resources later to his wife. . “ We were told 


68 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


that there were no gentlemen at the west ; 
that they were all waiters, or carpenters, or 
farmers. What they meant was, not that 
the gentlemen were waiters and ranchmen 
and carpenters, but that the waiters and 
ranchmen and carpenters were gentlemen.” 

It was impossible to do any thing all day, 
but try to wait patiently for the sun to set. 
It was a very silent party that tried to wait 
patiently. No one complained, but every 
body, even the Optimist, was wondering 
whether it would be possible for them to en- 
dure the two weeks they had promised to 
spend in Kansas. 

It was still very warm when they left the 
hotel at nine o’clock ; but in the night the 
weather changed. As they stepped from 
the cars at Ellsworth, the sky was mercifully 
overcast, and the quality of the air, soft but 
not oppressive, and wonderfully grateful 
though not bracing, convinced them that the 
two weeks might not be entirely oppressive. 
And here let me chronicle the fact that never 
since that day have they experienced in 
Kansas any such heat as that of those ex- 
ceptional August days in 1 88 1 . 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


69 


IV. 

N O one was at the station for them. They 
found their telegrams of the day be- 
fore peacefully reposing at the post-office 
with the letters for the ranch ; so of course 
their friends were not expecting them. 

“ Mr. W ’s brother, I believe? ” said a 

stranger suddenly, touching his hat to the 
Romantic. 

“Yes; Mr. W is not in town, it 

seems ? ” 

“ He was not expecting you before to- 
morrow. Mr. G has just come from the 

ranch, and he says they were to drive in this 
afternoon to stay all night, that they might 
be sure to be here for the morning train. 
We can give you a room at the hotel till 
they arrive.” 

“ You see,” said the Man of Sense slyly to 
his wife, as they crossed the street to the 
hotel, “you are no longer an Optimist; you 
are not even the wife of a Man of Serose; 
you are now the sister of a ranchman.” 
“And you,” was the retort, “are nothing 


70 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


but the husband of the sister of a ranch- 
man.” 

“ I’m not-so sure about that. I may be a 
ranchman myself some time.” 

For the air of the west, which no gentle- 
man has been known to resist after a week’s 
trial of it, was beginning already to tell upon 
the strong-minded resolution of the Man of 
Sense the night before not to stay a day 
longer in Kansas than the two weeks sacredly 
promised. The Man of Resources was al- 
ready beginning to wonder whether he would 
not add to his resources a ranch of a thou- 
sand acres or so, “ just for the shooting 
season, don’t you know ? ” He was not as 
yet sensitive to the charm of sheep, but the 
sight of the prairie suggested prairie-chicken 
au naturel and quail on toast. 

They would walk before dinner, they said. 
The little street led to the top of a little hill, 
which, low as it was, hid from them the 
landscape. The ranch, they knew, lay nine 
miles away ; but the Romantic, from her 
pre-conceived theories of prairie, was con- 
fident that from the top of that little hill 
they would see the entire ranch in the dis- 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 7 1 

tance. Probably they would see their 
friends emerge from the front door and enter 
their carriage ; they would watch them all 
the way into town, and when they arrived at 
just the spot where they were waiting in 
ambush, they would spring out at them and 
demand “ their money or their life.” What 
fun ! 

“ There are only two objections to that,” 
said the Man of Sense, as they reached the 
top of the hill. “ It is evident that we can’t 
see more than a mile, and there really isn’t 
any thing that by any stretch of imagination 
could be converted into ambush.” 

There certainly was not. Not a tree, not 
a bush, not a flower, not a stone ; nothing 
but the wild prairie, by no means a dead 
level, however, for the land was undulating 
enough, as he said, to prevent their seeing 
more than a mile. Nothing but short wild 
grass, and even that was not green. What 
was it in the air, that in spite of the utter 
lack of every thing that their educated in- 
stinct had taught them to consider desirable 
in a landscape, made their blood dance and 
their eyes shine, and their hearts rejoice ? 


72 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

The sense of absolute freedom was delicious. 
What should they do to pass away the time? 

The Extravagant thought he would bal- 
ance his cash, presumably to see if he had 
money enough to buy a ranch. They threw 
themselves on the short brown grass, and 
laughed and jested, and would have thrown 
things at each other if there hid been any 
thing to throw ; when suddenly a sound as 
of the rending of the earth just beyond them 
made them both spring to their feet. 

“.It’s a herd of horses!" exclaimed the 
Man of Sense. “ By George ! isn’t that 
fine!" 

On they came. 

“ Quadr up edante putrem sonitu quatit 
urignla campum /" heads erect, feet flying, 
the steady thud of their hoof-beats as ex- 
hilarating as a strain of martial music. Two 
ranchmen, with broad sombreros , high boots, 
and vivid scarlet handkerchiefs tied loosely 
at the throat, seemed to be pursuing rather 
than guiding the herd ; but they swerved a 
little from their course to meet the evident 
interrogation in the eyes of the Man of 
Sense, touched the sombrero to the Roman- 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


73 


tic, answered pleasantly and willingly all 
questions, but asked none in return about 
the east — for what was the east to Hecuba, 
or Hecuba to the east? — touched the som- 
brero again, and galloped on. 

“I think,” said the Romantic, gazing after 
them, “that I begin to understand it ! ” 

The Extravagant had forgotten all about 
his cash ; true, he was feeling in his pocket- 
book, but it was not after money ; he was 
trying to find a scrap cut from a New York 
paper, which he proceeded to read aloud as 
he flung himself again upon the grass : 

“ I have seen beautiful saddle horses in 
Fairmount Park, and I have watched riders 
in Central Park pounding their saddles with 
the triphammer ease of the English riding- 
school ; I have seen the ‘flyers,’ and their 
wonderful jockeys, throwing away the miles 
like so many seconds in Jerome ; I have 
seen armies of cavalry sweep across the 
battle-field, while the ground fairly rocked 
and trembled under their charging feet ; I 
have watched, thrilled with excitement, a 
sixrgun battery go wheeling and thundering 
into position in the very face of a charging 


74 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH . 


column at a time when minutes meant 
hours ; but I think I never saw the horse 
when he seemed so much a part of the land- 
scape ; when all the freedom and beauty of 
earth and air and sky seemed to be made to 
harmonize with him, his strength and beauty 
and grace, until I watched him sweeping 
over the great sky-encircled prairies of the 
west.” 

Then they rose and walked slowly back 
to the hotel. 

It was a problem never settled to their 
satisfaction, why — when the chief grievance 
of the scenery all the way from Chicago had 
been the interminable fields of corn — they 
should have canned corn for dinner. They 
partook of it sparingly, being graciously ad- 
mitted to the dining-room a little before the 
crowd, that, as the landlord expressed it, 
they might secure their dinner before things 
had been “ mussed over much,” — beguiled 
another hour with a local newspaper des- 
cribing the “ East Lake ” furniture of a 
hotel in a neighboring city, and were sud- 
denly interrupted by the arrival of their 
astonished host and hostess. 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


75 


“ Do you really mean,” said the Parsimo- 
nious, as a pair of spirited black horses and a 
comfortable carriage drove up to the door, 
“ that this elegant vehicle belongs to you ? 
I expected to drive out in a hay-cart or a 
lumber wagon. Pray how are our trunks to 
be taken out in this?” * 

“ O ! three of my teams are in town, and 
one of the men will look out for the luggage,” 
answered carelessly the bronzed young 
ranchman. 

Three of his teams ! the Romantic gazed 
fixedly at the young man whom she had 
known three years before as a pale young 
lawyer, sure perhaps of to-day’s dinner, but a 
little anxious as to to-morrow’s, and as she 
noted the exchange of listless eyes and 
languid interest for the alert manner which 
betrays the man of affairs, she said quietly, 

“ I begin to think, as you say, that it is 
better to be first in a village than second at 
Rome.” 

“ And before we have done with you, my 
lady, you will have to confess that to be 
nothing at all in this village is better than 
being first at Rome ! ” 


7 6 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


Mr. G , who had been east on import- 

ant business, was to arrive by the evening 
train ; so another of the teams was detailed 
to wait for him, while the rest of the party 
started for the ranch. 

“Then you will acknowledge,” said the 

Romantic, alluding to Mr. G ’s business 

at the east, “ that you have to go east for a 
wife ? ” 

“Not at all,” said the young ranchman, 
glancing slyly at his own eastern wife. “I 
was just thinking how many eastern girls 
were coming west for a husband ! ” 

Their sufferings of the day before at Kan- 
sas City seemed incredible now, as under a 
cool gray sky with a breeze that made 
wraps acceptable, they drove rapidly over 
the prairie. Suddenly their host reined in 
his horses and said quietly, 

“ There is the ranch ! ” 

It was still two miles away, but the large 
house, built of stone picked up on the place, 
was conspicuous with its red roof and wide 
piazza. Two or three times they lost sight 
of it again before they crossed the creek, 
bordered with beautiful trees and shrubs, 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


77 


that served as moat and drawbridge at the 
very entrance of the “ grounds.” The hall 
door was still a quarter of a mile away, but 
it stood hospitably open. 

“ We shall dine at six,” said the young 
hostess, as she led her guests to the prettiest 
bed room. 

“ At six ? do you really dine late ? ” 

“Yes,” laughed the little lady. “We 
keep up all our traditions, and I dress for 
dinner every night, if I only put on a differ- 
ent calico.” 

And when at six they sat down to a soup 
which the Romantic now has prepared for 
her most elegant dinner-parties in New York, 
to chicken served upon Minton china with 
delicious jelly from the wild plums on the 
creek, to St. Louis beer in the most ex- 
quisite of cut-glass, to custard, musk-melons 
and coffee, the Parsimonious began to 
wonder what were the privations of western 
life. 

If the lady from “ the center” could have 
wandered that evening within sight and 
hearing of Elk Horn ranch, seven hundred 
miles further west than the city supposed to 


7 § 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


be, intellectually at least, “ on the frontier,” 
this is something of what she would have 
seen and heard : 

A large square stone house with red roof, 
and a broad piazza, with awnings, covered 
with red settees and Wakefield chairs, occu- 
pied at the moment by two or three Harvard 
graduates with cigars. Attached to the 
house, but not communicating with it, were 
the “ quarters,” where the men at that time 
employed on the place had their own cook 
and lived entirely by themselves. Scraps of 
negro melodies, or Moody and Sankey 
hymns floating out on the quiet evening air, 
betrayed the cheerful spirit pervading the 
“ quarters,” while from the house itself came 
an echo of Chopin nocturnes, a bit of Schu- 
bert’s serenade (sung in the original), or the 
bright waltz from “Olivette.” If nothing 
was heard from “ Pinafore,” it was because 
they were tired of “ Pinafore ” in Kansas ; 
but it is just possible there may have been 
a strain or two from the score of “ Patience,” 
though that opera had not yet been brought 
out in New York. 

And if the lady from the “ center ” had 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


79 


drawn a little nearer and looked in at the 
window, the shades being still undrawn 
(though be it known by these presents that 
there were shades, and draperies besides), 
she would have seen a room brightly lighted 
with swinging lamps that had all the effect 
of gas, an ebonized mantle with mirror set 
into the wall, a piano, books overflowing 
every chair and table, a Palmer and Batch- 
elder clock, a Rogers group, scrap-baskets, 
plaques, and Kate Greenaway tidies. The 
ladies — one playing Chopin at the piano, 
one embroidering something in Kensington 
stitch, and one turning over the leaves of 
Scribner — had evidently “ dressed for din- 
ner.” Through the open door could be seen 
a wide hall with laid wooden floor and rugs, 
opening into a square inner hall from which 
led a staircase so broad that it required a 
breadth and a half of carpet to cover it, with 
a broad landing and Gothic window half way 
up. On the piazza the gentlemen could be 
heard discussing the Greek play, and 
reminding each other how “ Riddle,” who 
had -been a classmate, had hated Greek in 
college. 


So 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


A strict regard for truth compels me to 
remind the reader that this is not given as a 
type of ordinary ranch life. It is an excep- 
tional story that I am telling, but even as an 
exceptional story it has seemed to me 
worthy of being told. I am trying to show, 
not how all ranchmen live, but how one 
ranchman has found it possible to live, “ on 
the frontier.” For it was leaning back in 
one of the arm chairs of the parlor at Elk 
Horn ranch that a prominent New York 
artist said carelessly last year, “ No, I am. 
not taking back any Kansas * interiors ; ’ if 
I ever want any, you know, I can run into 
any Fifth Avenue parlor and get a few 
points ; it seems to be quite the same thing, 
you see ! ” 

And again I am compelled to remind the 
reader that the luxuries I have been describ- 
ing are not mentioned as the immediate 
results to young pioneers who had begun 
three years before with herding their own 
sheep. The charming house at Elk Horn 
now was the Major’s house, the comfortable 
home just put up for the wanderers who 
were to return in a few weeks to establish 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


81 


themselves permanently in it. But it was 
the nucleus of many just such charming 
homes which now make Ellsworth County 
famous for its success in “ struggling with 
the difficulties of frontier life.” 

Our travelers were up early the next 
morning ; it had been impossible to resist 
the sense of novelty, and the beautiful rosy 
dawn creeping in at the windows. After 
breakfast would they ride, or drive, or walk ? 
Perhaps they would like to go to the woods ? 
“ Woods in Kansas ? ” asked the Romantic. 
“ Well, not many, I confess ; but we have 
woods. Or rather,” with a half sigh, “ the 
Major has woods. It’s all the Major’s now. ” 
And truly they were driven into what 
almost seemed a forest primeval, where the 
growth was so luxuriant that they had to 
bend their heads as they passed under the 
trees, and sometimes send forward a scout 
to see if they could pass through at all. 

“ However,” said the Enthusiast, “ it’s not 
so bad as the sunflowers.” 

. “ Bad as the sunflowers ? ” 

“Yes; you are too early for them; but 
when they do blossom, late in September, I 


82 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


wouldn’t undertake to drive you through a 
field of them. Will declares that he has 
seen fifty acres of them in blossom all at 
once, and so tall that they towered above 
his head as he sat on horseback. They 
always talk out here of the groves of sun- 
flowers, and I know I have had to go out of 
my way a mile sometimes to avoid them.” 

“ It seems to me,” said the Optimist after 
luncheon, as their host threw himself on a 
sofa with the last new novel, “ that you 
young gentlemen have a great deal of elegant 
leisure at your command for people who are 
‘ struggling with the difficulties of frontier 
life’?” 

“ Plenty of leisure just now ; but if you 
wait till lambing or shearing time, or even 
till harvest time, you will see what stuff we 
are made of.” 

“ And you never are lonely ?” asked the 
Romantic of the lady of the ranch. 

“ Lonely? how can we be lonely ? we have 
been married two years and we have dined 
alone together just six times ! ” 

And as if in confirmation of her words, a 
message was just then brought in that “ Mr, 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 83 

M , of Boston, had just ridden out from 

town and would stay to dinner.” 

Nothing would probably be seen of the 
gentlemen before dinner-time ; so the ladies 
adjourned to the piazza with novels and 
opera-glasses. 

To watch for the mail. 

It is popularly supposed at the “center” 
that people on ranches never have any mail ; 
but the Optimist found that on her particu- 
lar ranch she not only had her letters every 
day, but sometimes twice a day and 
once three times. She considered it a 
delightful feature of the mode of life 
that you never knew when you would have 
a letter, as any kindly visitor might pull one 
out of his pocket. 

“ There he is ! ” 

A small black speck had dawned in the 
horizon ; still too small to be identified, even 
with an opera-glass ; but nothing ever did 
dawn on that horizon that was not a man or 
a horse — except indeed the faint curl of 
smoke from the locomotive as the Kansas 
Pacific swept past twice a day to Denver — 
and never a man or horse that was not com- 


8 4 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


ing to the ranch ; so of course it was James 
with the mail. He was still so far away that 
he could not be seen to be in motion ; a lit- 
tle longer, and they could see that he was 
coming swiftly; twice he disappeared behind 
the hills, but at last he galloped across the 
moat and up to the door, tossing to the ex- 
pectant ladies thirty letters for five of them ! 

And it was only one day’s mail. 

The gentlemen rose at four the next morn- 
ing ; for they had been given to understand 
that breakfast would depend on their own 
exertions, and they had decided that it 
should be plover. They partook generously 
of melon and started off in the team, firing 
over the mules’ heads and returning at seven 
with plover enough for the household. 

After plover, what ! It was certainly time 
that they saw the new ranch ; so the mules 
were taken out and the horses harnessed in, 
and away they bowled over the rustling 
grass. Beautiful as they had thought “ Elk 
Horn,” it was voted that the new ranch sur- 
passed it in possibilities, especially in its 
view. It is a popular delusion at the 
“ center ” that the view in Kansas is very 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


85 


good, what there is of it, and that there is 
plenty of it, such as it is ; but the most fas- 
tidious could hardly complain of looking 
sixteen miles away over a beautifully undu- 
lating country, to the Smoky Hill River, 
with noble elms and shrubs wreathed with 
the wild grape-vine betraying the course of 
the creek as it curled lovingly around the 
little hill soon to be crowned with the only 
thing that the landscape lacked : a home. 

After dinner it was suggested that they 
ride. Of course the Optimist rode ? 

Oh, of course ! 

So the horses were brought to the door. 
Which would the Optimist choose ? for four- 
teen horses and ponies, each with- its attend- 
ant groom — the men having all assembled 
from the “quarters’' to take part in the 
scene — had been brought up for inspection. 
They were all very small, and extremely 
gentle and meek looking; so the Optimist 
mounted fearlessly and enjoyed to the utmost 
the easy “ lope ” over the prairie. 

“Now,” said their hostess, as they turned 
the' horses’ heads homeward, “ let’s have a 
little run ! ” 


86 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


The Optimist has always declared that 
nothing else was said or done to encourage 
the horses ; but she was conscious of noth- 
ing more, but a frantic effort to cling to her 
saddle, till her horse, of his own account, 
stood still at the house door. 

The Optimist had never seen any thing at 
the east run so fast unless it were running 
away. She had not been exactly frightened, 
for there were no carriages to come round the 
corner suddenly, no bicycles to startle the 
steeds by their very quietness, and no stones 
in the path for the horses to trip over ; it had 
simply been “ unexpected,” as she ex- 
pressed it. 

“ I was told,” said the Parsimonious with 
dignity, “ that I might be given a gratuitous 
ride on a whirlwind ; but I did not expect to 
be invited to ride upon lightning ! ” 

V. 

S EVERAL days had passed when the 
Man of Sense asked one morning at 
the breakfast table, 

“ Why do you call this a sheep-ranch ? ” 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


87 


Then it suddenly ’occurred to every body 
that they had been riding, driving and walk- 
ing in all directions for ten days without 
having seen so much as the ghost of a lamb. 
The sheep had been removed from Elk Horn 
to keep the range good for the new proprie- 
tor in the fall. They were being “ boarded 
out ” in fields not very far away ; but a special 
excursion should be made to them at once ; 
as it would never do to spend a summer on 
a sheep ranch without seeing a sheep. 

No one could tell exactly what made the 
days go so fast ; but the reader will perhaps 
understand if we give an epitome of one, 
chosen at random. 

At half-past five the Romantic had already 
been an hour on the piazza. Her hostess was 
still peacefully slumbering up stairs, grateful 
that for once the gentlemen would not want 
an early breakfast ; but the Romantic was a 
novice, and had not yet learned to resist the 
beautiful rosy dawn and delicious air. 
Beside her lay the inevitable opera-glass ; for 

a speck on the horizon meant Mr. G , 

who had spent the night in a shanty on his 
new claim, and would have been in town the 


88 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


evening before for a later mail than they had 
received in the afternoon. She had time, 
however, to embroider an entire spray of jas- 
mine before he galloped up to the steps, 
tossed her the letters and demanded cof- 
fee. 

He must wait a little ; for now on the 
opposite horizon had dawned another 
speck, which meant the Man of Resources 
with plover. The plover had just been 
broiled to a nicety, and fragrant coffee was 
pervading the air, when a man rushed in and 
demanded the master. 

The master had been in town the night 
before at a wool meeting and would not 
return till after the morning mail. What 
was the matter? 

There was trouble on the new ranch ; they 
could not enter into actual possession till 
certain papers came from Washington, and 
the man of whom it had been bought, 
impatient at a delay which was quite as try- 
ing to the purchaser as to himself, had said 
that not another stroke of work should be 
done on the place till the money had been 
paid. If a man hauled another load of stone 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 89 

or dug another shovel full of earth, he would 
shoot him. 

“ Oh ! it is awful ! ” exclaimed the anxious 
little wife. “ If those papers w'ould only 
come ! ” 

“ Couldn’t we go home by way of Wash- 
ington,” suggested the Optimist, “and hurry 
them up ? ” The Man of Sense thought the 
United States government objected to being 
hurried ; and so sorrow and gloom settled 
down over the piazza, for they all knew how 
the Enthusiast would feel to have work on 
the new house interrupted. Just before twelve 
he was seen to cross the moat, gesticulating 
wildly and waving something white that 
was not a handkerchief, in the air. 

“ The papers from Washington ! ” he 
shouted as soon as he could hope to make 
them hear. “You’ll have to go back to 

town with me, G . Change the horses, 

James, and give us a bit of luncheon, please ; 
we’ll have those deeds signed before we 
sleep ! ” 

An impromptu lunch, a hasty farewell, and 
they turned from speeding the parting to 
welcome the coming guest ; for the ranch- 


90 


THE STORY OF A RAiVCH. 


men were hardly out of sight when the cous- 
ins from Churchill, sixteen miles away, 
arrived to stay over night. 

Had they seen the grasshoppers ? 

No ; they had been too much excited at 
the ranch that .morning to notice grasshop- 
pers ; but every eye glanced upward. 

A strange* place, the Romantic thought, 
to look for grasshoppers, in the sky ! 

But there they were ; how many millions 
of the little creatures in that vast and shin- 
ing cloud, it awed one to contemplate. 
Picture to yourself, if you can, a snow- 
storm with the sun shining, every exqui- 
site little flake distinct and clear in the 
golden atmosphere, but floating upward * 
instead of' down. The little creatures v 
are really as gray as our familiar grass- 
hoppers of the field ; but with their gauzy 
wings outspread in the sunshine, they are of 
dazzling snowiness. How many millions 
upon millions upon millions, in that one float- 
ing cloud ? 

“ But were they not afraid for their crop? ” 
asked the Parsimonious anxiously, remem- 
bering the story she had been told of a grass- 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 91 

hopper that had carried her cousin’s baby 
from the porch where it was slumbering 
peacefully in its cradle to a neighboring corn- 
field. 

“ Oh no ! ” was the calm and confident 
reply. “ This merely meant that there would 
be grasshoppers next year; they would see 
that none of them would light.”* 

Nor did they; some floated down close 
to the roof, but not one touched the ground. 

The short afternoon was diversified by 
the return of the ranchmen with the coveted 
deeds signed and delivered, and the evening 
was given to music. The cousin from 
Churchill had forgotten none of the cunning 
which she had learned from Otto Dresel fif- 
teen years' before and supplied the Beet- 
hoven ; their hostess, more recently from the 
“ center,” gave them Olivette and Wagner, 
while the voice of the Romantic soared on 
the wings of Sullivan’s “ St. Agnes Eve.” 

And now began the visiting ; for the 
arrival of friends of a distinguished fellow- 
townsman had been chronicled in the local 
newspaper and invitations flowed in from all 
over the country. First, to Black Walnut 


9 2 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


ranch, sixteen miles away, to spend the 
night ; starting in the freshness of early 

morning, overtaking G at his new 

“ claim ” and receiving the mail of the even- 
ing before from his voluminous pockets, 
passing Fort Harker with its legend of the 
pretty cousin who had danced away an 
officer’s heart and been carried off to the 
Yellowstone for her pains, past the sod 
house with grass and flowers growing and 
blossoming at will all over the roof, to the 
little brown house in which centered the in- 
telligence that managed the hundreds of 
acres for miles around. 

It was a tiny little house, but within 
were Morris papers with dado and frieze, 
plaques, Japanese umbrellas, and books 
in profusion. From the little room be- 
hind the parlor came a sound of duets, 
while the Romantic busied herself with 
taking the pattern of an aesthetic scrap- 
basket, glorying in the prospect of. submit- 
ting it some day to the lady at “the center,” 
and telling her, after it had been laboriously 
executed, that it was the design of a “ strug- 
gler on the frontier.” 


THE STOR V OF A RANCH. 


93 


“ Home with papa ! ” exclaimed Queen 
Titania, who was nominally visiting at her 
brother’s ranch, but evidently meditated a 
permanent residence. “No, indeed. He is 
coming for me in October, and we intend to 
let him come, because we want to see him ; 
but I shall not think of leaving here before 
spring, and, I shall only go then, because it 
will be Helen’s turn to come out.” 

She spread her pretty white embroideries 
complacently on the doorstep, but started 
up with suspicion as the sound of wheels, 
with four masculine voices accompanied by 
guns, betrayed that the gentlemen were 
deserting. 

“ Are we not to go, too ? ” she demanded 
imperiously. 

“No, indeed!” shouted an unfeeling 
brother as the team rolled on. “We are 
going for prairie chicken.” 

The Optimist was quite resigned to being 
left, as she wanted to see the sheep come 
home ; a pretty feature of ranch life which 
.they had missed at “Elk Horn.” Truly, it 
was worth waiting for; two or three thou- 
sand sheep winding slowly across the grass 


94 


THE S TOR Y OF A RANCH. 


with their tinkling bells, one little lamb 
whose feet had been injured among some 
rocks being carefully carried in the herder’s 
arms on horseback. 

The gentlemen were received with deris- 
ion when they returned with one prairie 
chicken. What was one chicken in compar- 
ison with three thousand sheep ? 

I can not help smiling as, three years later, 
I copy these words from my diary. For 
Queen Titania has kept her word ; she did 
not go back that fall, nor yet in the spring, 
nor yet in another spring. Still is she 
spreading contentedly her white embroider- 
ies on her brother’s Kansas doorstep, though 
the doorstep and the door are larger and 
finer now, since the beautiful great stone 
house has been put up in place of the tiny 
wooden one. “ Papa ” had come for her in 
October, and gone back without her as she 
had prophesied ; still another October 
brought him again, this time to stay himself. 
Not indeed to superintend matters; for 
these important young ranchmen in their 
new life regard the experience of their 
ciders at the east much as the Cambridge 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


95 


gardener regarded the knowledge of Professor 
Horsford: “faith, sir, ye may know a deal 
about chimistry, but, be jabers, ye know 
nothin’ at all at all about soddin’ ! ” The 
fathers take it all in good part, with that 
reconciled pride which makes us all satisfied 
when it is our own “ youngsters ” that get 
the better of us. This particular “papa” 
at Black Walnut ranch, accepted his infe- 
rior position in the household with the meek 
observation after several months’ residence 
in Kansas, “ I can not begin to express to 
you, my son, what pleasure it is to me to 
find that you are beginning to feel confi- 
dence enough in me to let me feed the 
pigs ! 

And Helen had “ come out ” without 
waiting for Queen Titania to go back ; it 
being always remembered that to a Kansas 
convert ayounglady’s “ coming out ” means, 
not her advent into social drawing-rooms, 
but her escape from them to the free and 
delicious prairie. Nor will Helen ever go 
back; for to-morrow her wedding bells ring 
out across the prairie. The Harvard grad- 
uate who three years ago “ dropped in ” to 


g6 THE STOR Y OF A RANCH 

dinner at one of the Ellsworth County 
ranches and forthwith decided to cast in his 
fate with his brother alumni of the west, 
will carry her away, ten miles away, to a big 
ranch of her own — and his. Good luck go 
with thee, bonny Helen ! the first of our 
eastern brides to celebrate the wedding on 
the prairie. As black to white may seem 
the sunny days at Black Walnut ranch, com- 
pared with those that are to come at the 
White Bluffs! 

Another day our party drove sixteen 
miles to luncheon at Churchill. It was a 
lonelier ranch : twenty miles from any rail- 
road, though the mail came to them every 
day by stage ; but it was a wonderfully lovely 
scene that lay spread before them ; the 
Saline River with its tall trees and exquisite 
meadows only half a mile away, and the high 
hills picturesque in the distance. Luncheon 
was served on china painted by the young 
daughter of the house. She had been 
brought up on the ranch, but had shown 
such genius as a child in modeling little 
Rogers groups of her own design, about two 
inches high, having nothing to do it with 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


97 


but Kansas mud and a pin, that they had 
decided to send her to an art school at the 
“ center. ” She was now sending home beau- 
tiful china, but writing in every letter, “ I 
will stay through the year that you sent me 
for, but not a minute longer ! not a minute ! ” 
The mother had been a pupil of Agassiz and 
had educated her boys on the ranch, so that 
when they were sent east for finishing 
touches, they not only entered Boston 
schools ahead of their class, but were pro- 
moted with astonishing rapidity. School, 
however, was the only thing they cared for 
at the “ center,” and their rollicking delight 
in getting back to the prairie was curious to 
see. 

On still another day they received a 
formal invitation to dine with “Mr. and Mrs. 

S .” A glance of amused intelligence 

passed between the host and hostess, which 
was not explained to the rest of the party 
till, on driving up to the door at “ Idlewild,” 

Mrs. S appeared as another gentleman. 

The two ranchmen who entertained so gen- 
erously at Idlewild, had cast lots when they 
began ranching and roughing it, to see 


9 8 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


which should do the cooking, both being 
equally ignorant of the fine art of the cuisine. 
The one to whose lot it fell to make the ex- 
periment developed such immediate and 
unexpected talent in that direction, that he 
was never allowed ta resign the care of mat- 
ters within doors, and the affection between 
the master and the “ mistress ” was one of 
such exceptional strength and tenderness 

that the sobriquet of “ Mrs. S ” had been 

given to Mr. D quite as much because 

of the devotion to him of Mr. S as 

because of his own culinary skill. 

The drive home was a memorable one. 
First, they passed the Table Rocks, the 
great mushrooms of stone which alone are 
worth the journey to Kansas to see, if one 
can not go to Colorado ; and then they 
startled a coyote. The pretty creature stood 
perfectly still, waiting with evident curiosity 
while the Man of Resources leaped from the 
carriage with his gun ; but he did not wait 
quite long enough. 

A little further on, they saw five tall reeds, 
each swinging in the air under the weight of 
a little owl. 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


99 


“ Prairie dogs ! ” exclaimed the Enthu- 
siast. 

“ Why dogs, when they are owls ? ” in- 
quired the Man of Sense. 

“ Because they are always together, and 
they say that a rattlesnake is generally in 
the hole, too. I promised to show you a 
prairie-dog town, and you may be sure there 
is one here/’ 

In a very few minutes they found them- 
selves in the midst of it ; acres of ground 
covered with little hillocks of earth thrown 
out of the holes, in each of which, like a 
hen on its nest, sat either a prairie-dog or an 
owl. The suddenness with which they had 
come upon them, with the startled barking 
of the hundreds of little creatures sitting 
there, passive, but alert, made the scene a 
singular one. They would wait in their 
holes, watchful, but unalarmed, almost under 
the very carriage wheels ; but if they caught 
any body’s eye, they would dart instantly 
out of sight into the burrowed earth. 

It was quite dark when at last they drew 
up at their own door ; but although the 
welcoming odor of coffee was not ungrateful, 


IOO 


THE ST OR Y OF A RANCH. 


* the Romantic declared that for the first 
time in her life she began to appreciate the 
delights of camping out, and if they could 
only find themselves obliged to pitch a tent 
in the dry, sweet evening air and prepare 
their supper out of doors, she would be 
willing to wait a little longer for the coffee. 

That evening a prairie fire lighted up the 
horizon. 

“ I believe now,” said the Optimist, 
“ that we have seen every thing in Kansas 
that we came to see.” 

“ Except an antelope.” 

They saw the antelope the next night at 
supper — but he was fried. 

The last evening had come; for they had 
undertaken to “ do ” Colorado as well as 
Kansas, and they had already been at the 
ranch a week longer than they had originally 
planned. It was a temptation even now to 
give up Colorado, as they sat on the piazza 
after dinner, listening to that murmur of the 
wind behind the low hills which on the 
prairie is so singularly like the beat of the 
surf just out of sight; an impression deep- 
ened by the broad open outlook which is 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


101 


more like the sea than like land on the 
prairie at night ; while the steady glow of 
the only light in sight, the light of a single 
lamp burning in a cabin two miles away, 
seemed singularly like the serene glow of a 
light-house. 

The Colonel and Major I had driven 

out from town to dine with them. 

“ Whenever I come back from the east,” 
said the enthusiastic Major, who had spent 
many years in Kansas, and who, I really 
believe, gave up army life when Fort Harker 
was broken up rather than leave Ellsworth 
County, “ I feel like springing from my horse 
and kneeling down to kiss the soil ! ” 

“ I can’t say that I felt very much like 
kissing the soil when I arrived,” murmured 
the Romantic, remembering the frightful 
dust and the goggles of the hackmen at 
Kansas City. “ It seemed to be quite too 
determined to kiss me. But I will say that 
now I am going away, I could kneel down 
in that soft prairie grass over there and kiss 
it good-by ! ” 

Whereupon the gallant Major presented 
her with some of the wonderful fossils for 


102 


THE STORY OF A RANCH 


which Kansas is famous, that she might take 
them with her as a talisman, to press her 
lips to them if she were ever in danger of 
forgetfulness. 

“ To an American about to visit Europe, 
the long voyage he has to make is an excel- 
lent preparation,” quoted the Optimist the 
next day in the cars, when the rest of the 
party, overcome with the heat and the flat- 
ness and dreariness of western Kansas as 
compared with Ellsworth County from the 
car windows, were restlessly sighing them- 
selves back at the ranch and disposed to 
annihilate the Romantic for insisting that 
they should not give up the Colorado caflons, 
simply because Kansas had proved more 
attractive than they had supposed. 

“ I don’t mind the flatness of the coun- 
try!” exclaimed the Man of Resources, for 
once helpless and indignant. “ What I want 
to know is why I have been carried round 
ninety-nine horse-shoe curves at a rate of 
forty miles an hour, to creep at a snail’s 
pace all day across a country where the 
human imagination is not powerful enough to 
conceive of the possibility of any accident! ” 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


103 


“ They don’t want to wear out their 
rails,” murmured the Parsimonious. 

“ Rails ? ” exclaimed the Extravagant. 
“ If they will only use these up, I will give 
them an entire new set.” 

It was trying ; they could not quite forget 
that the thermometer stood at iio°, even 
with the Optimist’s gentle reminder, that 
the next day at the Windsor they could 
have a cool bath and ice-cream. They 
learned at last the monotony of a Kansas 
prairie, mile after mile, acre after acre, 
prairie after prairie, of grass not long enough 
to wave, even if there had been a breeze to 
wave it ; not a flower, not a brook, not a 
bush, not so much as an ant-hill, except 
when the dreadful little towns at intervals 
made the landscape hideous as well as 
monotonous. 

Only once that day was the Man of Sense 
seen to smile. That was when a lady be- 
hind them was heard to say : 

“Yes, I am sorry to break up and go 
west, for I have heard that people out west 
are not so sociable as they are in Kansas.” 

“ Where do you suppose the west is ? ” he 


164 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


was heard to query. “ I doubt whether 
people on the Pacific coast even will own to 
being west of any thing but Greenwich. 
What fun it would be to start that lady at 
‘the center’ in search of the frontier.” 

“ If I don’t see at least a haystack to-mor- 
row, I think I shall go mad ! ” said the Ro- 
mantic wearily at sunset. 

“ Speaking of haystacks,” said the Man of 
Sense, the next morning, when the oriental 
curtains had been packed away and the 
Romantic happened for the moment to be 
riding backward, “ what do you call that ? ” 

She turned to find herself confronted, as 
if Nature in the night had been contemplat- 
ing some grand satirical reply to these peo- 
ple, who had dared her to raise a haystack, 
by a mountain ; a mountain on whose upper 
slopes, that August morning, the snow lay, 
dazzling in the rosy sunlight. A mountain, 
the first of many, many mountains, growing 
higher and higher, thronging closer and 
closer, till the Romantic drew her breath in 
quick gasps lest Nature meant to crush her 
for her irreverence the day before. Higher 
and higher, closer and closer, snow-crowned, 


THE STORY OF A RANCH 105 

snow-wreathed, shutting them in on both 
sides of the cars — ah ! what other city in the 
world can boast that magnificent approach 
to Denver ! 

When at last they stepped from the cars 
at the station, it was into such a splendor 
of gold light that they seemed never to 
have seen genuine sunshine before. It was 
not the sunshine of the prairie ; it was the 
cool, invigorating sunshine of the mountains ; 
and as the Diligent Suggester of Unneces- 
sary Articles heard the Extravagant change 
his order at the Windsor from a cold bath 
and ice-cream to a fire in their room and 
hot coffee at once, she inquired mildly, 

“ Now do you see the wisdom of not 
having left at Chicago the trunk with our 
Lake Superior furs ? ” 

And here I must leave them ; for this is a 
book about Kansas, and it is very far from 
my intention to make you like Colorado 
better than Kansas. I only speak of it here 
as an additional attraction of Ellsworth 
County, that if the prairie ever palls, or the 
heat becomes excessive, more quickly than 
you can reach' the White Mountains from 


io 6 


THE STORY OF A RANCH 


New York, more comfortably than you can 
reach them even from Boston, you can slip 
away from the prairie and the heat to the 
grandeur and the snow of the magnificent 
Rockies. You can dine late at Elk Horn or 
Carneiro, and breakfast the next morning at 
Denver ; and, be it known, a summer break- 
fast at that perfectly-appointed hotel, the 
Windsor, where a fly never was seen, and 
where the only possible lack is that the 
mackerel have to be salt mackerel, is really 
worth the journey, when you consider that 
approach to the city which has preceded the 
breakfast, and the shopping that is to follow 
it, in streets that suggest shopping in Wash- 
ington street or Broadway, with a mountain 
suddenly set at each end of the long avenue, 
and snow-crowned mountains in view every 
time you glance down a side street. If you 
have only ten days to spare from your be- 
loved ranch and prairie, you can whirl 
through, if you will, four of the most glo- 
rious cafions on the earth’s surface; climb 
Musquito Pass, glance at the wilderness of 
Manitou-Saratoga, draw inspiration to last 
you for a year from H. H.’s lovely home at 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


107 


Colorado Springs, cross the Veta or the 
Marshall Pass as you may elect, look in 
upon Leadville, breakfast once more at the 
Windsor, and dine the same night at Elk 
Horn or Carneiro again. As a suburb of 
Kansas, Colorado has not its equal ! 


VI. 



HE Man of Resources was thoughtful. 


-L We knew what it meant : he was 
thinking what a beautiful resource a western 
ranch would be ; not any western ranch, but 
a ranch in Ellsworth County, Kansas. The 
Man of Sense was seen to do a great deal of 
figuring. There were more interviews with 
a certain friend who was a millionaire, and 
more correspondence with the young ranch- 
man about to leave Elk Horn, than even the 
Romantic thought could be ascribed to pure 
friendship and brotherly affection. The 
result was that the young man who, three 
years before, had begun with a very small 
borrowed capital, and who, on dissolving 
the partnership at Elk Horn and finding 


108 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

himself able to pay off his debt and have 
something ahead, had decided to risk a little 
ranch of his own with another tiny house on 
it only four miles away, now had a propo- 
sition made to- him which — well, which he 
accepted. The senior partner of the youthful 
firm at Elk Horn would become junior part- 
ner of a new firm of three, with a capital to 
“ back ” him which was, — well, was an en- 
couragement. The new ranch should be 
enlarged to ten thousand acres; the new 
herd to ten thousand sheep ; and the new 
house, which had not been completed and 
could therefore easily be enlarged, should 
have an “ office ” and additional bedrooms 
included in the original plan. The junior 
partner, besides being a member of the firm, 
should be its active manager and live at the 
ranch ; for the millionaire had only been 
convinced that the ranch was a good place 
for his millions and was still confident that 
personally he should prefer yachting ; and 
the Man of Sense objected to having any 
thing more to do in the way of labor than 
might be included in the keeping of the 
books and running out to the ranch in sum- 


THE STORY OF A RANCH 


109 


mer to see how things were going on and 
shoot a prairie chicken or two. Harvard 
graduates, anxious to “study the profes- 
sion,” would be given board and lodging for 
the inestimable privilege of herding the 
sheep, digging post-holes, and otherwise 
acquiring the knowledge essential to becom- 
ing a “leading” ranchman. They could 
occupy the new and superfluous bedrooms in 
winter, and in summer when the Man of 
Sense and his family would require them, 
could club together in the “Annex,” a little 
stone house which could be fitted up with 
“ bunks ” which were all that “tenderfeet” 
ought to expect. 

And in April the Man of Sense thought it 
was time for him to “ run out ” for his sum- 
mer supervision. It was suggested that the 
prairie chicken would not be due until 
October, but, — well, at any rate, he thought 
he ought to be starting. The Romantic 
was quite willing to accept the early date 
for departure; for they had been too late 
the year before for the wild-flowers, and 
she wanted this year to see the very first 
one. “The first million, I ought to have 


no 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


said,” she exclaims in correction, looking 
over my shoulder. The children were to go, 
too, this year, and it is needless to add that 
they were quite ready to leave school in 
April for the unknown experiences of any 
thing. So we went in April. 

The journey of three days and two nights 
from New York has become to us one of 
the pleasant features of a summer in Kan- 
sas. No change is necessary till we reach 
St. Louis, all meals being served on board 
the fine cars of the Pennsylvania Railroad, 
and the trip through the beautiful valley of 
the Susquehanna and the wild loveliness 
of the Allegheny mountains is worth taking 
for its own sake alone. Unless you are in a 
hurry to reach your ranch, as we unfortun- 
ately always are, it is worth while to spend a 
few hours in St. Louis to secure the ride by 
daylight over the Missouri-Pacific Railroad, 
with its charming river scenery. We had 
always been so anxious to have the Alle- 
ghenies by daylight, that we had invariably 
gone over the Missouri-Pacific in the night ; 
till once, starting to come back, we were 
amazed to find what we had been missing. 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


hi 


Only one more change, — at Kansas City, 
and in another twelve hours you are at the 
ranch. 

It was one of the advantages of the new 
ranch that although eleven miles from the 
little city of Ellsworth, which was the base 
of such supplies as were not ordered at the 
east, and two miles further from it than Elk 
Horn, it was within two miles of the railway, 
where a little station rejoicing in the name 
of “ Alum Creek ” included a post-office and 
telegraph station. So they were to leave 
the cars at “ Alum Creek.” 

If any thing could be more forlorn than 
the dismal name of this little place, it was 
the place itself. Only the station, made out 
of an old car not in use, and the post-office, 
which in eastern parlance would have been 
called a shed, and the wide prairie, gray and 
dull in the bleak spring air. Our party 
were not disturbed by it ; yonder by his 
horses stood the enthusiastic junior partner, 
waiting for them with vehicles of various 
descriptions ; they knew very well what de- 
lights were in store for them just out of 
sight beyond those first low hills. They 


1 1 2 


THE STORY OF A RANCH 


knew very well what a summer on the prairie 
meant, and only chatted and smiled and 
jested the more gayly as the people in the 
cars stared in blank amazement at their 
courage in getting off at such a place. 

“To stay all summer ?” queried the be- 
wildered conductor as he escorted the Ro- 
mantic to the platform. 

“ I tell you,” added the good natured 
porter, as he lifted the youngest to the 
ground, “ that’s too fine a boy to be left out 
here on the prairie for a month ; and that’s 
as long as you’ll be staying, I guess,” with a 
confident nod. 

And the people in the cars grew more and 
more bewildered. This gay party of five, 
who had left New York with the evident 
intention of going somewhere for the very 
best time they had ever had in their lives, 
were destined to alight at “Alum Creek!” 
Their luggage, which bore marks of having 
been in Europe, at Newport, at Niagara, at 
the White Mountains, at Mount Desert, at 
the Isle of Shoals, on the Great Lakes, in 
Colorado, was now being tossed off at “Alum 
Creek!” It consisted of trunks enough to 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 1 13 

decidedly delay the train as they were 
thrown off, and it looked as if it might be 
full of embroidered white dresses ! Em- 
broidered white dresses at Alum Creek ! It 
had been supposed that the party were look- 
ing forward to the dissipations of Denver or 
the “ hops ” at Manitou at the very least ; 
and here they were, alighting at Alum 
Creek ! They had not even the grace to look 
as if they were surprised, or disappointed 
at their surroundings. The Romantic 
was smiling brilliantly at the tall young 
ranchman by the horses : the Extravagant 
was slipping a dollar into the hand of the 
good natured porter who had praised his 
boy ; the boy himself had started for the 
ranch on foot as the family in general were 
so slow in moving; the Young Gentleman 
of the family had mounted a waiting pony, 
radiant with delight at emancipation from 
the “ ring ” of a city riding school ; and if 
the Daughter of the House looked a little 
cast-down, it was only because she would 
have to wait till they reached the house be- 
fore she, too, could ride ; her habit being 
locked away in one of the trunks supposed 


1 14 THE STOR V OF A RANCH. 

to be full of embroidered white dresses. 
The Diligent Suggester of Unnecessary Ar- 
ticles had shawls enough to defy the prairie 
breeze ; every body looked more than com- 
fortable ; actually they looked delighted ! 
Poor young things ! they were tryingto keep 
their courage up ! and the last of the trunks 
having been tossed off, the train moved 
slowly on, with the sympathetic conductor 
and the wondering porter still staring from 
the rear platform of the rear car at the poor, 
deluded party for Alum Creek ! 

The new house with the new rooms was 
not quite finished ; but cards were out for a 
wedding reception in honor of the bride 

whom Mr. G was to bring in ten 

days ; so it would have to be finished by 
that time. Meantime as they would never 
lock the front door after it was in, it did not 
matter much that at present there was no 
door; except that the April breezes were 
still a little cool. 

“ It is lovely,” said the Romantic, as she 
stood on the piazza gazing down the beauti- 
ful valley with its winding creek, its fields of 
winter wheat waving in the strong breeze 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 1 15 

like a beautiful lake of foliage, and its blue 
hills set in a frame in the hazy distance, six- 
teen miles away. “ But I do wish we didn’t 
have to call it Kansas. 1 Bleeding Kansas ’ 
is all I can think of, and I always thought 
of Kansas as a place for rows. I wish we 
could change the name ; it does remind one 
so of 1 Pike’s Peak or bust.’ 

“And as for ‘ Alum Crick ,”’ she added 
with indignant emphasis, “ I will never have 
my letters addressed there, even if I could 
get them a day earlier. I have told every 
body to direct to Ellsworth.” 

“ But, my dear,” said the Man of Sense, 
“‘Alum Crick ’ is merely the vernacular 
corruption of ‘ Ehn Creek! a romantic title 
enough certainly, and a compliment to our 
own three splendid elms on its banks.” 

“ And besides,” added the Man of Re- 
sources, “ they have told us at Washington 
that they will change the name of the post- 
office to any thing we suggest.” 

“That is it ; if you would only suggest,” 
sighed the Romantic, who longed for the 
ranch to be called something which she 
could have engraved on her summer note- 


Il6 THE STOR V OF A RANCH. 

paper. The Man of Resources, who had 
been in Brazil and was rather fond of Por- 
tuguese, suggested “Carneiro,” the Por- 
tuguese for sheep, it being generally con- 
ceded that the main object was to secure a 
name for the post-office that should be 
entirely original, to prevent letters from 
straying off to other counties and other 
states. None of “ the firm ” wished it to be 
called Washington, or Jefferson, or Calhoun ; 
equally determined were they that it should 
not be known as Paris, London, or Delhi. 
A name of its own it must have, but no one 
could tell what. The “ Diligent Suggester ” 
wanted it to be called “ Shaveno,” as at once 
original, historical and purely western ; but 
heads were shaken. 

“‘Carneiro’ sounds prettily,” said the 
Romantic. “ And you could call the post- 
office Carneiro, and the ranch Monte Car- 
neiro, because it is built on a hill, you know. 
And ‘ Monte Carneiro Ranch ’ would be 
lovely on our note-paper ! ” 

“ I’m not in any hurry about it, of course,” 
said the Diligent Suggester. “ I will merely 
say, however, that I have a set of colors in 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 1 17 

my trunk to be presented to the ranch on 
the day it is christened.” 

And when the beautiful U nited States flag, 
with its stars and stripes and crimson and 
white and blue, was unfolded on the parlor 
table, and the Diligent Suggester declared 
that it should not be unfurled from the roof 
till the house had a name, patriotism 
triumphed, and the desire to see it that very 
moment flung to the breeze, made the 
family unanimous in voting for “ Monte 
Carneiro.” 

“But I’m awfully afraid the people round 
here will translate it and call it ‘ Mutton 
Hill,’ ” said the ranchman. 

It was a few days after this that the Young 
Gentleman of the family said as he saun- 
tered into the parlor. 

“ Mamma, didn’t you say you wanted to 
see the first wild-flower? ” 

“ Yes ; have you found it ? ” 

“ I ’ve found it, and it’s worth going to 
see ; will you drive or ride ? ” 

“ Ride.” And in half an hour the 
Romantic issued from the front door — there 
was now a front door — riding-whip in hand. 


THE STORY OF A RANCH 


ti8 


“ Two miles to look at a flower ! ” whis- 
tied the ranchman, as he strode off to his 
corral. 

But the flower would have served a good 
purpose if only as an excuse for the ride ; 
the exhilarating ride over the wide prairie. 

“ There it is,” said the young gentleman, 
halting suddenly and pointing down into a 
meadow below them. 

The Romantic held her breath, then 
gasped for delight. 

It was a river of flowers ; I do not know 
how else to describe it. A deep hollow, 
like the dried channel of a river, perhaps 
nearly half a mile long, completely filled, 
between bank and bank, with a mass of 
most exquisite pink flowers. Not a green 
leaf nor a stalk could be seen, and there 
was not a break in the broad surface of 
bloom; though the flower itself, when ex- 
amined, proved to be the tiniest of things ; 
something not unlike the little white sweet- 
clover that we find in eastern garden beds, 
only of a most wonderful rose color. The 
curious part of it was that not a single one 
of the flowers could be found any where in 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 1 19 

the meadow, even a foot beyond the river- 
bed ; they were concentrated there, and only 
there, and lay like a broad pink ribbon on 
the prairie ; a bit of landscape gardening 
which I have never seen a landscape gar- 
dener able to surpass. 

If I were to chronicle the flowers as they 
appeared, I might date my pages, as the 
Romantic did her diary, “ The day we found 
the first sensitive rose ; ” “ the day we drove 
over to Elk Horn to see the prickly pear 
with sixty blossoms on it ; ” “ the day we 
saw the sunflower twenty feet high ; ” “ the 
day that I, a member of the Society for the 
Protection of Animals, which ought to in- 
clude flowers, trampled down half an acre of 
crimson portulacca because I couldn’t find 
room for my horse’s foot where there wasn’t 
a blossom,” etc., etc. But I have grown 
fond of large figures since I have known the 
west, and am tempted to mass my flowers 
as nature does there, and give them all to 
you at once. Ah ! if my page could only 
glow with their color ! There were very few 
of the flowers we had known at the east ; 
many were not even in the botanies. 


120 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

“ Can’t you tell us what it is ?” demanded 
the Romantic of the Enthusiast one day, as 
she held up a superb flower entirely new to 
her. “ I am sure you studied botany at 
Harvard.” 

“Only because it was a soft elective,” said 
the unabashed ranchman. 

“ And besides, mamma,” explained the 
daughter of the house, latest from her books, 
“ Gray’s Botany is only arranged for the 
flowers east of the Mississippi River.” 

“ So it is ! so it is! ” murmured the grate- 
ful graduate with an appreciative nod at his 
friendly niece. “ Of course I couldn’t be 
expected to know any thing about it ! ” 

The bride and bridegroom were to arrive 
from the east two days before the “ Recep- 
tion ” and were to stay with us till their own 
new house was finished at their ranch six 
miles away. The bridegroom, a college 
classmate of the Enthusiast, had been one 
of the partners in the former firm at Elk 
Horn and was now in partnership with still 
another graduate in a new venture. 

It was a dreary night for a bride to receive 
her first impressions. It did not storm, but 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


1 2 1 


it was pitifully dark, and a gale was blowing 
that might dishearten the bravest. We 
must be ready to open the door the moment 
the bride alighted, lest she be swept away 
by the wind from the very porch. It was 
so dark that we could not hope to see the 
carriage coming; the wind blew so that we 
might not even hear their voices if they 
called to us at the very steps ; but with 
faces pressed against the glass we watched 
to see the lights from the two brilliant win- 
dows at the men s quarters momentarily 
eclipsed. That would mean that the carriage 
was passing the “ quarters,” and in two min- 
utes more we must open the door. Fortun- 
ately experience had taught us to close the 
parlor door in such emergencies ; but there 
could be no possible help for the light burn- 
ing in the hall. The moment the door was 
opened, the light went out, and the stranger 
in a strange land, blown into a perfectly 
dark hall, received her first impression of 
the exigencies of a western ranch. Some- 
thing that was tall, and might be a bride, 
held out helpless hands to us ; something 
that seemed to be friendly and certainly was 


122 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


human, grasped the helpless hands with a 
laugh and a murmured apology for the wind 
and the darkness. In another second the 
hall door had been closed and the parlor 
door thrown open : she was ushered into 
what must have seemed for the moment a 
Paradise of warmth and light and color; 
with the grateful firelight playing over east- 
ern rugs and portieres and bric-a-brac ; with 
flowers and books and music in profusion ; 
with the odor of coffee in the air, and east- 
ern hearts and faces to seal the welcome. 

The two days following were filled with 
preparations for the “ reception prepara- 
tions. which, like the rehearsals for private 
theatricals and tableaux, are often the most 
entertaining part of the performance. If 
they were destitute of one kind of resources, 
they were well provided with another ; if 
they could not send into the next street for 
a larger tray for the coffee cups, they could 
send word to their own private carpenter on 
the place to make them one of just the 
right dimensions. The ice-cream had to be 
made at home, but there was plenty of cream 
to make it of. The wedding-cake and the 


THE S TOR Y OF A RANCH. 


123 


macaroons had come with the bride from 
Boston, but every thing else was prepared 
on the place. There was no professional 
florist to decorate the house, but the most 
ignorant of amateurs could hardly fail to 
make a house beautiful with such flowers to 
do it with ; and the young men and maidens 
who had assembled for this friendly office 
were by no means ignorant amateurs. When 
all was finished, try to picture to yourself a 
house decorated for a ball with only wild- 
flowers ! Not only were the mantles 
“ banked,” but the deep window-seats were 
masses of bloom, while a glow of color 
transfigured little tables in the corners to 
pyramids of loveliness. Flowers wreathed 
the sideboard and were massed upon the 
supper-table; while tall plants of the lovely 
Yucca or broad masses of the priakly pear 
stood about the rooms. The Optimist 
thought it providential that the billiard table 
had not arrived ; for it was essential that 
the billiard-room, opening into the large 
parlor through a wide archway, should be 
quite free for dancing, and the billiard-table 
would have been a hard thing to push out 


124 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


of the way for a single evening. But the 
great resource and the final triumph of the 
evening was “Jim.” 

“Jim,” — the body-servant of the Man of 
Resources, the valet of the Extravagant, 
the hostler of the Man of Sense ; who, 
pleased as we all were with our newly- 
acquired ability to speak as members of 
“The firm,” of “our" ranch, and what “we" 
were intending to do, insisted nevertheless 
on having his private horses and his own man 
to attend to them. “ Jim” was the man ; he 

was faithful, alert, indefatigable and 

black. 

So it occurred to the Man of Resources 
that Jim should be made tl}e colored servant 
of the “ party.” Investigation proved that he 
had served in that capacity at the east, and 
the agility he took pains to display with the 
recently made waiter laden with the best 
china astonished and awed the admiring 
servants of the kitchen. White cotton gloves 
were imported from Ellsworth ; a Harvard 
graduate contributed a white tie that had 
last seen the light at a Cambridge assembly ; 
the Extravagant had two dress-coats and 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


I2 5 


consented to sacrifice the older one, while 
the Diligent Suggester of Unnecessary Arti- 
cles produced from her stores a white linen 
coat belonging to the Man of Resources, 
which she proceeded to transform into a short 
white jacket for which the dress-coat should 
be exchanged on the part of Jim when the 
time came to officiate at the supper-table. 

“ I shall wear this old pair of white 
kids,” murmured the Parsimonious, as she 
retired to her room to dress after decorat- 
ing the salad. She had in her trunk the 
tan-colored ones just coming into style in 
New York with evening dress ; but of course 
the fashion could not possibly have pene- 
trated yet to ranches, and if she appeared 
with the “ latest” she would only be sus- 
pected of coming from the ignorant “ Down- 
East.” 

When she entered the ball-room an hour 
later, it was to find every lady in the room 
with tan-colored gloves with from six to 
twelve buttons ! 

“ I might have known ! ” she murmured in 
vexation, at the thought that nozv she would 
certainly be supposed to have come from 


126 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


“ down east.” “ Of course, they take the 
Bazar ! ” 

It was a pretty scene. Hanging lamps 
had all the effect of gas ; the large rooms 
were beautiful with flowers and flags ; the 
pianist and violinist had arrived from Kansas 
City; Jim was a marvel of address and 
eastern elegance ; dress-coats with the dust 
of Harvard Class-Day very recently brushed 
from them, bowed before the tan-colored 
gloves of the ladies in exile who kept them- 
selves au fait with the Bazar: all was bright- 
ness and gayety and bloom. 

It. is essential in fixing the time for a 
ranch festivity of this kind, to make sure of a 
night with a moon. Not even the oldest 
inhabitant dares to cross a prairie at night 
without a moon. We had fixed upon a 
night when the moon was supposed to rise 
at midnight, for the guidance of our guests 
on their return ; but clouds veiled her light 
at midnight, and it was four o’clock the next 
morning before the first guest dared to say 
farewell. All was brightness within doors 
to the last ; devotees of the german rarely 
know whether it is midnight or four o’clock, 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


127 


and the indefatigable Jim passed beef tea at 
three with all the grace with which he had 
handed coffee at eleven. 

“ Hans Breitman gife a barty ; 

Where ish dat barty now ? ” 

Ah well ! have I not done my best to 
secure immortality for it ? 


VII. 

I T was a busy summer. The new house 
had been finished of course before the 
“ reception,” but for months there was much 
building of barns, sheds, woolhouses and 
corrals. The Enthusiast had never wavered 
from his firm belief, verified by experience, 
that capital put into sheds is money well 
spent, where the climate, though never se- 
vere for any length of time, is often suddenly 
and dangerously tempestuous. Only once 
have we been in danger from a cyclone, — 
though of course sheds are no protection 
against cyclones, — but the hour we spent 
then on the piazza watching the terrible 
cloud, silent but significant, awful in its 


128 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


unusual shape, is one I do not care to repeat, 
even with the consciousness of the little 
house built into the side of the hill to which 
it had been arranged we should retreat in 
case of actual danger. But there are storms 
of wind or rain or snow, as terrible as they 
are sudden, when sheds for the stock are 
invaluable in saving their lives. We would 
be roused at night sometimes by wind and 
rain and thunder too severe for any but the 
youngest to sleep through tranquilly. I 
have looked out of the windows at midnight 
when the incessant flashes of lightning had 
all the. effect of a great pulsating electric 
light, to see what seemed to me must be the 
Connecticut River at its broadest pouring 
through our beautiful and beloved valley. 
And yet £t six o’clock the next morning the 
sun would be shining and there would be 
so little vestige of the heavy rain that one 
could walk about the place after breakfast 
without overshoes. Only the creek betrayed 
the difference ; the pretty winding creek 
with its mass of shrubbery and its tall trees. 
The day before it had been almost dry, and 
now, pouring, tossing, leaping along in a 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 129 

perfect whirl of delight, the delicious water 
was hurrying to find the. river. And by 
night, perhaps, even the creek would be 
nearly dry again ! 

Then they were now in the midst of the 
hurry and excitement of a genuine sheep- 
ranch. There had been no sheep at Elk 
Horn the summer before, and it was a novel 
pleasure to watch the coming and going of 
the great herds of little creatures to and 
from the corrals. They had arrived just in 
the midst of lambing, and each herd as it 
came in at night would number more than 
when it went out in the morning, the little 
lambs that had been born on the prairie 
during the day taking their constitutional of 
two or three miles back to the corral that 
they had never seen, as easily and with as 
much dignity as if they had known all about 
it for years. At the mature age of three or 
four days, however, some of them would 
decide that they preferred to remain on the 
open prairie ; then woe to the unhappy 
herder ! Many and many a night would the 
ladies walk out to meet the herd, on the 
sole chance of seeing the inimitable fun of 


i3o 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


such a catastrophe. For pure, unadulter- 
ated amusement I know of nothing equal to 
witnessing the chase o Far grown man over a 
boundless prairie afterja little creature less 
than a foot long and not more than three 
days old. The running of a man for his hat 
is nothing to the entertainment of such a 
spectator; the struggles of the driver of a 
refractory mule are nothing to the sufferings 
of such a herder. It is martyrdom without 
any glory, and I believe the lamb is seldom 
caught or tired out without the aid of a 
sheep-dog. 

The arrival of an entirely new herd would 
of course cause still greater excitement. 
Then for hours on the day they were 
expected we would scan the horizon with 
anxious opera-glass, and their first appearance 
on the brow of the hill would be the signal of 
a demand for ponies. These first signs 
were nothing that a “tenderfoot ” would 
have been able to distinguish as sheep ; just 
a little cloud on the horizon ; a something 
that was not there an hour ago ; something 
not for a long time to be distinguished as 
even a moving mass ; but resolving itself at 


THE STORY OF A RANCH 131 

last unmistakably into a thousand sheep, still 
moving steadily almost as one great creature, 
rolling down the slope of a hill as solidly as 
a great ball of quicksilver, but as it neared 
the corrals narrowing and narrowing those 
abreast, till only one solitary sheep led the 
troop to its new pastures. The Enthusiast 
went out on foot to meet them ; once having 
reached them, he turned on his heel to march 
back again, never twisting his head to see if 
they were following, — he knew they were, — 
solemnly followed by the one sheep that had 
taken the leadership of the rest by no known 
process, of election, through the narrow gate 
and into the new corral made ready for them. 
Men shouted and sheep-dogs barked ; ponies 
galloped and ladies clapped their hands with 
delight. When at last the entire thousand 
were quietly housed for the night, we stood 
outside the fence gazing with never-ceasing 
wonder at that sea of woolly faces. Every 
one of the little creatures stood in precisely 
the same attitude, all facing us as Clytie 
might have faced the sun. 

And anon came the shearing, when the 
great white fleeces, — or rather, to be literal, 


I 3 2 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


the very dirty fleeces, — were stripped one by 
one, folded, weighed, tied up and tossed into 
great sacks, whirled off in wagons to the 
station and shipped to Walter Brown & Co., 
Boston ; and when, as the poor little wizened 
shivering creatures slipped out of the shear- 
ing shed and back to their green pastures, 
we felt as if we had parted to Messrs. Brown 
& Co. with half our flock, instead of giving 
them merely their great coats. 

Yes, it was a busy summer. In the spring 
prairie fires were set when the place was safe 
and when the wind was right, that the new 
grass, not dry enough to burn dangerously 
and spread destruction as do the great fires 
in the fall, might come up fresher and greener 
in the blackened wastes. Then there were 
the great fields to be plowed up for the great 
harvests of rye and millet and sorghum and 
wheat and corn and oats, the plow, we 
were told, sometimes running straight for a 
mile without turning up a stone. Of the glory 
of those fields as the harvests ripened I can 
not hope to speak ; for the first time I under- 
stood the meaning and the beauty of the 
phrase “ white unto the harvest.” When 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 133 

it came to gathering them in, the unspeak- 
able delight of the children in the great 
labor-saving machines that only did not 
seem human because they seemed so super- 
human in intelligence, was not any greater 
than that of their surprised and amused 
elders. 

Fifty men sometimes sat down to dinner 
at the “ quarters ” during this haying and 
harvesting season. As a rule the work went 
on with perfect smoothness, master and men 
feeling an equal pride in making Monte 
Ccvrneiro the best ranch of the county. 
But there is always such a sudden demand 
for labor at just these seasons, that it was 
hardly to be wondered at that the men 
“ struck ” one day for higher wages. The 
Enthusiast told them that all whom he hired 
temporarily by the day should receive the 
increased wages made reasonable by the sea- 
son ; but the men whom he employed by 
the year he should expect to work by the 
year, their wages in winter being correspond- 
ingly better than those of the tramps who 
relied on sudden earnings in August. They 
could leave if they chose. There were mur- 


*34 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


murings and dissatisfaction ; on the wool- 
house door was found a skull and cross- 
bones, and written under it : 

“ When W dies, 

Won’t there be fun ? 

We’ll go to the funeral, 

The sheep on the run. *’ 

Twenty of the men left ; twenty of the 
men whom we had considered our best men. 
But in twenty-four hours twenty other men 
had appeared, without any trouble of search- 
ing for them, and the work of the ranch had 
not suffered for an hour. As a rule, the re- 
lation between- master and man is a singu- 
larly pleasant one. Those with families have 
small houses of their own scattered over the 
ranch, and to see that these have opportuni- 
ties for better supplies than merely the pro- 
verbial ham and bacon of the west, to admin- 
ister advice and medicine to the sick chil- 
dren, to provide them with good literature, 
to give them occasionally some little festival 
of their own, opens a field of active and per- 
sonal benevolence for the lady of a ranch 
which is to be counted as one of her pleas- 
ures. Think of getting up a Christmas tree 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 135 

for children who not only have never seen 
one, but who have never heard of one, and 
who, when the eventful day comes, will clasp 
a five-cent pencil tied with a ribbon and 
taken from the marvelous tree, with a grati- 
tude that can only find expression by reit- 
erating, •“ Oh, is it mine f really mine ? all 
mine ? ” There are twenty-seven children 
on the Monte Carneiro ranch, quite enough 
for a joyous little festival on the ranch it- 
self, and the Romantic told the children be- 
longing to a neighboring school that she 
would send them a box, with a present and 
a Christmas card for each child, if they 
would promise to get up a Christmas tree 
among themselves. She was not there when 
the time came, but the box went, and I am 
told that it was a very pretty sight to see a 
tree hung with four hundred gifts , besides 
what went in the box, prepared by the chil- 
dren and their friends. So much for a little 
leaven ! Nor must I forget the point of the 
story ; there are no Christmas trees to be 
had in Ellsworth County, and we sent to 
Kansas City for ours, supposing that the Car- 
neiro children of the school-house would 


136 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

have to do the same. But no ; when the En- 
thusiast and his wife, who represented Monte 
Carneiro at the festival, entered the room, 
imagine their astonishment at seeing a beau- 
tiful great tree, very large and perfectly sym- 
metrical, but with bare boughs twined with 
colored tissue paper ! and I am told that the 
effect was charming. 

It was in connection with this same school- 
house at Carneiro that we spent one of our 
most interesting afternoons. There are 
five school-houses to the support of which 
the Carneiro ranch has to contribute a very 
large part of the school tax. A meeting had 
been called to assess taxes for the coming 
year, and as the chief tax-payers, it seemed 
proper for us to be present. The ladies 
would have a vote, and so all the ladies 
went. 

As soon as the preliminaries had been set- 
tled, the Enthusiast took the floor. To us 
it was his maiden speech, although we knew 
that he was president of the Wool-Growers’ 
Association, and we had heard that he could 
speak well on topics that he had so much at 
heart, though oratory had not been consid- 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


137 


ered his strong point at Harvard. It was 
important that our friends at Carneiro should 
not think we had come in a body to vote 
down what was almost exclusively for their 
interests and against our own so far as mere 
money was concerned. So the Enthusiast 
began in a clear, unfaltering voice, standing 
before the blackboard with a suggestive bit 
of chalk in his hand : 

“I believe in education! [great applause]. 
I want every man, woman and child, and es- 
pecially the children [great applause], to 
have the very best chance possible, and 
there is no chance like a good education. 
So I propose first that we vote ourselves 
nine months schooling for the coming year in 
the Carneiro district ! ” 

Immense applause from the people who 
had heretofore had but four, five or six 
months’ schooling. 

“And I propose that the school-house be 
put in perfect order for the winter ! ” 

More applause. 

“ But I think we can do all this with a 
good deal less money than you have -voted 
yourselves before for fewer advantages. This 


138 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

is proved by your having two hundred dol- 
lars left in the treasury from last year. Now 
let us see ; what do you estimate that you 
will have to pay a good teacher ? ” 

Question and answer on all practical points 
followed with quick readiness, and the chalk 
did duty nobly with its convincing statistics. 
In an hour every thing was settled ; the vote 
far more satisfactory to us as tax-payers and 
to those who readily saw that they were to 
have more for their money than ever before. 

Then came the election of officers, and 
when it was suggested that three disinter- 
ested persons be appointed to count the 
votes, a voice deep in its intensity, and im- 
pressive in its slowness, uttered from some- 
where in the background what I have never 
forgotten as a lesson in moral and political 
economy : 

“ I don't see why it is necessary for those 
three men to be disinterested ! ” 

Later the question arose whether they 
would have a male or a female teacher, and 
the Enthusiast suggested an amendment to 
the motion that a male teacher be selected, 
to the effect that the decision should be left 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


*39 


to a committee with full powers to decide 
according to the acquirements of whatever 
candidate should seem best prepared, 
whether male or female. 

“ All right ! ” said the obliging chairman. 
“ But first we’ll vote on the other.” 

“No,” insisted the Harvard graduate. 
“ That isn’t parliamentary ; you must vote 
on the amendment first.” 

“ I’ll tell you what, Mr. W exclaimed 

the chairman in a burst of good-nature, “ you 
understand it a great deal better than I do ; 
you just come right up here and be chair- 
man yourself ! ” 

“ No,” said the Enthusiast firmly. “ That 
isn’t parliamentary, either. You are the 
chairman, and you must go on ; but you 
must vote on the amendment first.” 

“ Well, you see,” said the bewildered oc- 
cupant of the chair, “ we’ve no fault to find 

with you, Mr. W . We know you’re all 

right, and we’ve perfect confidence in what 
you say ; but those parlor-mentary rules of 
yours are a hard one ! We know they’re all 
right, but we have a way out here of cutting 
across lots , as it were, without any parlor- 


140 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


mentary rules, and I never could see but 
what we came out at just the same point in 
the end ! ” 

Great applause from the New York ladies 
on the right. 

“ However/' he added, as the applause 
subsided, “ we don’t wish to offend you by 
not seeming to care about learning your 
ways ; for they’re good ways, we know, if we 
only could understand them. So we’ll vote 
first on the amendment. 

“ The question now is, ladies and gentle- 
men, whether we shall have an amended fe- 
male, or ” 

“ Oh no ! no ! ” exclaimed the “ parlor-men- 
tary ” tutor, profoundly conscious of the 
presence of his lady friends on the right and 
of subdued laughter. “This is what you 
must say,” and the amendment was finally 
carried in true parliamentary fashion. 

The question of a library fund was then 
started. Some thought there was no need 
of going to that expense, but all yielded be- 
fore the undeniable justice of one man’s 
. plea : 

“ I don’t see what’s the use of our children 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


14 


coming to this school-house to learn to read, 
if they’re never going to have any thing to 
read ! ” 

The Parsimonious was on the alert at once. 
She had always longed to found a hospital 
in New York (homoeopathic), but had never 
been rich enough ; here was her opportunity 
to endow a library and reading-room ; for 
the Diligent Suggester of Unnecessary Ar- 
ticles had brought heaps of books with her, 
with which she had intended to beguile the 
tedium of ranch life, but which she had never 
opened, and of course she would not care to 
carry them all back to New York. The la- 
dies from New York took care that the vote 
for a library fund should be carried, and it 
was also voted that the fund should be placed 
in the hands of the Parsimonious, who was a 
famous hand at a bargain, to invest in books 
for the “ Carneiro Library ” on her return to 
New York. The Extravagant promised to 
send the Library the St. Nicholas for a year, 
and the Man of Sense persuaded the people 
to invest part of their money in Harper’s 
Magazine and Harper’s Young People. 

It was essential, however, that the Par- 


142 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

simonious should examine the library then 
existing, that she might not by any mis- 
chance send duplicate books. 

“ Can you tell me, Nelly,” she asked the 
next day of a little maid she met, “where 
the school library is kept ? ” 

“ Please, marm, Jennie Wilson took it 
home the day school stopped.” 

“ Took it home?" repeated the bewildered 
philanthropist. “ How many books are 
there in the library?” 

“ If you please, marm, — one." 

It proved that the little maid was thinking 
of the big dictionary which had been removed 
from the school-house for the summer. 
Further investigation showed that there was 
a very good library of about forty books, 
well selected, and showing that they were 
in constant use ; enough for a good begin- 
ning. 

This constant connection and identifica- 
tion of interests, only possible where those 
you are trying to help are, in a way, mem- 
bers of one great family, living, not in the 
next ward, but on your own “ grounds,” so 
to speak, results in a feeling of close interest 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


143 


not easily severed. No compliment that we 
ever received touched us quite so deeply as 
a casual remark of Dick, good-hearted, good- 
natured Dick, always ready to share our sor- 
rows and anxious that we should share his. 
He had received the news of his mother’s 
death on the very day we were expected the 
next summer, and said sorrowfully to my 
mother, 

“ I declare, Mrs. W , I do feel awful 

sorry to be feeling so bad the day the R s 

are coming back ! ” 

In spite of all the busy plowing and 
planting and harvesting and building and 
herding of that first summer at the new 
ranch, the merry visiting went on more mer- 
rily than ever. One friend drew another to 
settle in just that part of the country, till a 
little knot of those who had known each 
other at the east made a pleasant nucleus 
for a dawning “ society.” This little knot 
of friends are usually entertained at Elk 
Horn on Thanksgiving Day and at Monte 
Carneiro at Christmas, and twenty-two New 
Englanders sat down to dine together last 
Thanksgiving. Sometimes we dined at 


144 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


Lakeside Farm and were entertained after 
dinner with exquisite music from the 
daughter of the house, who had been a pupil 
of Lang. Sometimes we drove over to see 
how the Doctor was faring, building at 
Spring Creek Ranch, half way between 
Carneiro and Ellsworth, the pretty house 
that in the fall would shelter the wife and 
little daughter from Boston. And once the 
Romantic and the Man of Sense lost their 
way ! 

That is, they did not lose it, but they 
could not go on in it. They knew perfectly 
well where they were, and in what direction 
they ought to go ; for the lights of home, — 
the great stone house with its many glowing 
windows, — shone directly before them, and 
were only a mile away; but they had started 
from town just half an hour too late, and 
the early dusk — it was only a little after 
seven o’clock on an October afternoon — had 
h veiled the prairie with an impenetrable dis- 
guise. I can not hope to make understood 
the perfect ludicrousness of the situation, 
nor the utter impossibility of moving on, 
even with the general direction clear in our 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 1 45 

minds and before our eyes, and with no 
ravines or rocks or ditches to be afraid of. 
But there were horrid places in the road, 
and there was no road . The Man of Re- 
sources left the carriage and tried to feel for 
the ruts with his feet. It was no use. It is 
literally true that if the house of the foreman 
had not been so near, — only, indeed, what 
we should call two or three blocks away in 
New York, — we should have had to camp 
out in our carriage over night, only a mile 
from the home that shone with such stately 
indifference to our woes. Near as even 
Mac’s house was to us, we could not drive 
to it. 

“ My dear,” said the Man of Sense, com- 
ing anxiously back to the carriage, “ I can 
find my way on foot to Mac’s and bring him 
back with me with a lantern, if you are quite 
sure you are not timid about being left alone 
here a few minutes ? ” 

“ I have the courage of my surroundings,” 
answered the Romantic solemnly. “ I am 
morally Certain that we are the only idiots 
out on the prairie at this time of night. I 
feel quite sure that I shall not be molested, 


146 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

Therefore, go ; but return not without a lan- 
tern.” 

“ If you had followed my advice when we 
started,” said the Diligent Suggester of Un- 
necessary Articles, “ you would have brought 
a lantern with you.” 

Ten minutes more, and Mac’s cheerful 
voice, with Mac’s still more cheerful lantern, 
glorified the darkness. Even with the lan- 
tern we moved but slowly, but we did move. 

And now, alas ! the time was drawing near 
for us to make a longer move. We really 
dared not burn the candle at both ends, and 
keep the children out of school till Novem- 
ber, after taking them out in April. Creek 
and meadow and prairie were glorious in the 
autumn sunshine, but we must go! even 
though the heart of the Man of Resources 
failed him utterly, as on his very way to the 
station a covey of twenty-two quail flew up 
joyously and defiantly in his very face as we 
crossed the creek for the last time that sea- 
son, running along confidently in the ruts 
just ahead of the horses, and evidently per- 
fectly aware that the Man of Resources was 
no longer a ranchman with a gun. 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


47 


VIII. 

N O, of course we must not think of burn- 
ing the candle at both ends ; but we 
might surely burn it at one. We had taken 
the children from school last year in April ; 
this year we would stay in the city till the 
schools closed in June ; then we should feel 
justified in staying away till November. We 
should lose the wild-flowers — except the 
magnificence of sunflowers — but we should 
gain the glory of the late autumn : the 
tawny fields, the silent sunshine of splendid 
noons, * the low sumac — and the prairie- 
chicken. 

The journey was lovelier than ever; for 
all through the Susquehanna valley and the 
Allegheny mountains the laurel was in 
bloom, and each morning as the porter 
served their dainty breakfast on the cars, he 
would place beside the plate of the Roman- 
tic a bunch of clover with the dew on it. 
There was the same astonishment on the 
part of their fellow-travelers that there had 
been the year before, when the train slack- 


148 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

ened to let the party of five, with a corre- 
sponding amount of luggage, descend from 
the cars to be left apparently on a shelterless 
prairie. For “Alum Crick” had changed 
only in name ; there was still only to be seen- 
the tumble-down post-office and the rickety 
station, though the new title of “ Carneiro ” 
in fresh paint was worn over the door as a 
symbol of increased prospective prosperity. 
But the conductor and the porter no longer 
wondered. They were in the secret now. 

“Wonder where they are going?”said 
the conductor to the passengers, as he passed 
through the Pullman and the train moved 
on. “ Well, I’ll show you in a minute.” 

And as the cars rounded a curve he pointed 
through the windows to the little city set on 
a hill, two miles away, but even at that dis- 
tance showing itself to be a pleasant place 
to stay : the great stone house, the barns and 
sheds and woolhouses, with their red roofs 
glowing in the brilliant light, making quite 
the prettiest picture of a home they had seen 
since they left St. Louis. 

Though “ Alum Creek ” was the same ex- 
cept in name, there were changes at the 


THE STORY OF A RANCH 149 

ranch itself, many and beautiful changes. 
All winter the building had gone on ; the 
great windmill that pumped water into the 
house and the corrals from the splendid 
springs, was a pretty feature of the scene, 
while the square stone tower which served as 
reservoir was certainly an improvement to 
the landscape as well as to the comfort. It 
had been finished only a fortnight, but the 
little triangle of turf that had been torn with 
spade and shovel and trampled oyer by 
thoughtless and careless feet, had already 
healed its own wounds and repaired its 
scarred loveliness with a wealth of prairie 
bloom that even the landscape gardener of 
the Chicago parks might have been proud to 
point to as an effort of his own. A pond 
had been dug, furnished from another of the 
springs, which was to be stocked with Ger- 
man carp for the second course of prairie 
dinners, while the wild duck in the fall were 
expected to disport themselves in its clear 
waters within easy reach of the sportsman’s 
gun. We were assured that one duck had 
already plunged into its muddy depths, and 
signified his approval of the innovation in 


150 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

the landscape, muddy as it was at present. 
Beyond the pond could be seen tennis-courts, 
faintly outlined on the prairie just where the 
many windings of the creek made the trees 
that bent above it almost meet to form shady 
groves for spectators of the game to rest in. 
Monte Carneiro, like the other new ranches, 
had been visited by eastern parents unable 
to resist the impulse to see for themselves 
what the “ youngsters ” were really about. 
The “ padre ” of Monte Carneiro, not having 
yet reached that point in the confidence of 
his son when, like his contemporary at Black 
Walnut Ranch, he could hope to be intrusted 
with the feeding of the pigs, had as yet only 
been allowed to rake the avenues. This, 
however, he had done to perfection ; so that 
avenues, stately in length, beautiful in 
width, and magnificent in curve, swept up 
and around the house, perfectly free from 
weed or stone, with a freedom of motion and 
elegance of bearing that would do credit to 
any gentleman’s suburban residence at the 
east. To be sure, the Enthusiast himself did 
not greatly care for all this ; an avenue of 
approach is a luxury that even a gentleman- 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 151 

ranchman fails to see the advantage of. He 
watched these superfluous improvements 
with a covert smile which evidently meant 
that they amused the “ padre ” and didn’t 
hurt the ranch ; but even he approved thor- 
oughly of the plats of green New England 
grass which the “ padre” had succeeded in 
growing, as novel in the midst of the tawny 
prairie as if they had been beds of Jacquem- 
inot roses. There should have been peacocks 
on the “ terrace,” for peacocks had been 
given to the ranch for that purpose expressly, 
and their shrill voices could be heard in the 
distance ; but if any one knows how Lord 
Beaconsfield managed to keep his peacocks 

on the terrace, ah ! I remember, Lord 

Beaconsfield had no creek ! 

As the carriage swept up the avenue, a 
perfect symphony of dogs howled in greeting. 
The cool stone house was waiting for us, doors 
and windows thrown wide open to sun and 
breeze, a hammock swinging on the piazza 
in the wind and awnings tempering the sun- 
shine within doors. It was June, and 
it was warm, and it was sunny ; there was 
not a tree or a shrub within an eighth of a 


152 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


mile, yet not a blind was drawn. For there 
were no blinds. Dark shades we have in 
case of need, but even these are seldom 
lowered. That strange something in the 
rarer air of these high prairies which makes 
their brilliant sunshine like the brilliant 
sunshine of the seashore, — bright without 
being dazzling, and cooled by the breeze till 
one thinks neither of blind nor tree, — made 
the house set on a hill in the unprotected 
glow of a summer noon-day, seem as cool 
and attractive as the cottage at Nonquitt 
that we had given up for it. 

It was a merry party that sat down to 
dinner that day, for it was Sunday, and 
friends at leisure for the day had “ dropped 
in,” from five or ten miles about, to welcome 
us back, though there had not been intended 
any special dinner-party on the occasion. 
Would you like the menu ? 

In this, as in every thing else, two years, 
and more especially the last year, had made 
a great change in the resources at command. 
At the west, as elsewhere, the supply is 
greatly regulated by the demand. As 
eastern families increased in number, who 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 153 

must have fish and would not live without 
fruit, it was gradually found to be possible 
to secure what had always been thought 
before impossible comforts. At Elk Horn 
in the winter of 1880, the men and maids at 
the ranch had had a “party,” and one of 
the guests had come to the mistress of the 
ranch with a lemon-squeezer in her hand to 
inquire what it could possibly be for. She 
added that there were “ lots of queer things 
in the cellar,” and it proved that she had 
never seen an orange, an oyster, celery, sar- 
dines or almonds. So great is the change 
since then, that at the Ellsworth store all 
these things can now be obtained, and as 
eastern enterprise insisted that it would be 
perfectly feasible to have fish and fruit 
from Kansas City in the market at least 
once a week, the effort was made and 
of course proved a success. At all the large 
ranches a great store-room is naturally kept 
full of supplies from which the men with 
families and homes of their own purchase 
for their own necessities ; but the little city 
eleven miles away can furnish at need al- 
most any thing desired. 


154 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


So the dinner at Carneiro that day was 
really a tempting one. In the center of the 
table stood one of the great stone bowls, 
picked up on the prairie near the house, full 
of brilliant flowers. The stones are usually 
found solid, but a rap with a hammer easily 
knocks an opening from which escapes a 
quantity of the finest possible sand, leaving 
a large cavity as perfectly shaped as if it 
had been made with design. At every plate 
were tiny stones of the same sort, each 
filled with flowers of a different kind, while 
the sideboard, made by the carpenter of the 
place, but well worthy of transportation to 
New York, held masses of bloom arranged 
between the silver and the finger-bowls. 
And the menu was as follows : 

Tomato Soup. 

Fish from Kansas City. 

Monte Carneiro mutton, with vegetables. 

Lettuce with mayonnaise. 

Snow puddings. 

Coffee. 

Of course the ranch supplied itself with 
its own mutton, squabs, chicken, cream, 
eggs, vegetables, melons, prairie-chicken, 


THE STORY OF A RANCH , 155 

plover and quail. At a smoke-house on the 
place our own hams could be cured, and 
this summer it was decided to add our own 
beef to the resources. It is very seldom 
that cattle and sheep are run on the same 
ranch, but the Enthusiast had his reasons 
for trying it, and a herd of about three hun- 
dred cattle was added as an experiment. 
The Man of Resources, indeed, who had 
been exposed to the epidemic craze for 
fancy Jersey cattle in New York, inclined 
favorably to “ registered ” stock ; but the 
ranchman shook his head. The Jerseys 
would only do for dairy purposes, and the 
ranch could not well add a dairy to its 
resources: and besides, the western ranch- 
man, while he has a full appreciation of 
blooded stock, looks for the best pecuniary 
results from well selected animals of a less 
expensive kind. Some noble Swiss and 
Polled Angus animals of the first families, 
with the two little Jerseys, as pets, all “ reg- 
istered,” were, all that he would consent to. 
That fancy stock of this kind will eventually 
“pay” at the west as it has paid at the 
cast, is more than probable, as is indicated by 


156 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

the arrival of the “ grades ” or half-breeds, 
at which the least interested scoffers came 
to look ; and some who came to scoff 
remained to pay, their value over ordinary 
calves being self-evident. 

And although the Enthusiast was skepti- 
cal about cows worth five thousand dollars, 

• he was becoming more and more convinced 
of the desirableness of having thoroughbred 
sheep. The main herd of grade merinos 
being now as large as the ranch intended to 
run, he was turning his attention to thorough- 
breds, and the arrival of a single merino 
ram, considered the most perfect of its kind, 
or of a ewe lamb from which at the shearing 
of her first fleece they cut upward- of 
eighteen pounds of wool, would now be the 
signal for as much excitement as had 
attended the year before the arrival of a new 
thousand. 

The new interest in cattle brought about 
a pleasant visit to the largest cattle ranch in 

the vicinity, owned by Mr. M , who had 

had long experience in Texas, but who 
declared that he considered one acre in Ells- 
worth County worth five in Texas, 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 157 

Ellsworth County was becoming crowded. 
Ranchmen eager to preserve their “ range ” 
gazed askance at new candidates for admis- 
sion. Dr. C ’s pretty red-roofed house, 

a “ Queen Anne ” for that neighborhood — 
with its dados and friezes and books and 
pictures, and its hospitable mistress — made 
a new center for the riding-parties and whist 
parties and dinners. Just across the river 
the Baron was putting up a house on his 
new ranch for the wife and “ Kinder ” to 
come from Germany in the spring. He had 
dined at Elk Horn one day two years be- 
fore, and on leaving for New York again, 
had placed quite a sum of money in the 
hands of the young senior partner, almost a 
stranger to him, to invest for him in sheep. 

Later, he had come back — do they not all 
come back to Ellsworth County sooner or 
later ? — and now he was fully determined to 
cast in his fortunes with the new world. He 
had lived in Berlin, in Paris, in London, in 
New York and in St. Louis, but nothing, 
nothing was comparable to Kansas ! On 
comparing notes with the Romantic, it was 
found that they had both been in Paris at 


158 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

the same time, in 1870; he, as an officer in 
the German army, she as an American 
school-girl recently from Berlin and generally 
regarded by her suspicious companions as 
“ la Prussienne ,” but not too anxious to re- 
sume the study of separable verbs in the 

salons of France. Yes; Baron von V 

had even had the honor of being detailed as 
special personal guard to the Emperor 
Napoleon for a week after Sedan ; but he 
assures us he did not find it nearly so interest- 
ing to keep guard over an emperor as to 
watch his own herd of sheep ! 

So, though the work still went bravely on, 
the pleasant merry-making did not grow 
less. Our visiting list for that third summer 
shows the record of more than a hundred 
visitors. Nor were these merely the casual 
calls and visits of the county ; it is astonish- 
ing to see how many eastern friends came 
out by accident or design to see what it can 
possibly be that keeps you year after year 
from the charms of Nonquitt or the beauties 
of Montclair. Your brother-in-law in the 
navy is ordered to Japan and takes you on 
his way to San Francisco. Your cousin 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 159 

from Mexico comes north by the first over- 
land, and having to pass through Topeka will 
not go so near without looking in upon you. 
Your brother in the army, bound for the 
Yellowstone or Vancouver, finds his most 
direct route to lie through the Kansas prai- 
ries. Your dearest friend is ordered to Col- 
orado for her health, and stopping over at 
Carneiro for a week regains her health and 
gives up Colorado. Your.senator and repre- 
sentative coming back from Washington 
for the summer, will not forget the lovely 
view from the Carneiro piazzas ; and as the 
autumn comes, with its wonderful sunsets, its 
prairie-chicken, its tawny moors beautiful with 
the low sumac, its splendid noons that seem 
lighted almost as much by the great sun- 
flowers as by the sun, and its cool frosty 
nights when the wild duck gather at the 
ponds, the artist friend who had promised to 
“do ” the ranch and was sure he could do it 
most effectively when prairie-chicken made 
one of the “values” of the landscape, — who, 
in short, prefers his quail on prairie rather 
than on toast, — makes his appearance with 
brush and pencil and camera and gun and 


160 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

violin. Duck suppers take the place of the 
informal dinners ; and it is no detraction 
from the enjoyment that, as you can not 
drive home after dark across the prairie, you 
are compelled to stay over night with the 
friend who gives the supper. The house is 
big — and hospitable; the violin has been 
brought along with the cartridges, the game 
bags and the guns ; there is music after the 
duck supper, gay chat on parting for the 
night, sound sleep, and for the gentlemen 
live duck in the early dawn ! 

But, though it seemed so long to'promise 
to stay until November, the first of Novem- 
ber had come before we were half ready to 
come away. Already the evenings were too 
cool to sit on the piazza after dinner, and as 
we looked from the parlor windows we could 
see the long line of cars on the evening train 
of the Union Pacific lighted brilliantly from 
end to end. The schools had begun six 
weeks before, and we must go. 

So one cool frosty evening when the stars 
were out, well wrapped against the cold, we 
drove slowly over the rough road down to 
the little station. It was quite dark, in 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 161 

spite of the stars, but the men at work on 
different parts of the ranch knew that the 
rumbling of wheels meant our departure by 
the night train, and through the frosty 
darkness came familiar voices from unseen 
well-wishers : 

“ Good-by, Marland ! ” 

“ Good-by, Jim ! ” 

“ Good-by, Frank ! ” 

“ Good-by, Charlie ! ” 

“ Good-by, John — and Henry — and Luke 
— and George — and Stephen! Good-by! 
good-by ! good-by ! ” 

And our hearts were sorrowful. For the 
great house, beautiful with warmth and 
light, glowed behind us. Guests had come 
just before dinner — pleasant Scottish guests 
who would have much to hear and to tell. 
We knew how it would be ; there would be 
song and anecdote and story, a game of 
billiards perhaps, certainly some music, and 
a tray of tea. Overhead in the cool blue 
darkness, “ Great strings of geese went 
clanging to. the stars.” 

We were going back to a land where we 
could hear Gerster if we chose ; but some 


J 62 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

among us, the gentlemen I am sure, would 
rather have remained on the prairie and 
listened to the geese. 


PART III. 


ENCORE. 

“ A LLE Strasse fuhrt ans End der Welt.” 

said Schiller. The Romantic and the 
Man of Sense were always able to prove that 
all roads out of New York converged toward 
the ranch, and it was part of the pleasure of 
the trip that they were not obliged to go 
always the same way. If they were in a 
hurry, there was no possible objection to 
the nearest route, which was, indeed, one of 
the pleasantest, through the Allegheny 
Mountains over the fine Pennsylvania Cen- 
tral, with its charming scenery, alert service 
and dainty little meals served on board the 
train. But it is well to be able to vary even 
a pleasant thing, and having gone many 
times by way of the Alleghenies, once over 
the Baltimore and Ohio, once through the 
Lehigh Valley, and once even by the Great 


164 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

Lakes, it was decided at last to try the New 
York Central as far as St. Louis. This time 
they were bound eventually for the north- 
west, but the ranch was to come first. 

“ We shall not see any thing so pretty 
again till we touch the Rocky Mountains,” 
said the Romantic, as the cars sped swiftly 
on by the Hudson. “And it is perfectly 
funny that in spite of it, I am just longing 
for that waving prairie without a river or a 
mountain or a tree.” 

No one can ever congratulate himself on 
having “ done ” the west. The growth of 
the great cities, the starting of little towns, 
the new feats of railway engineering, make 
a second trip something different from the 
first, even after an interval of only a year. 
Two years had passed since our party had 
spent a summer at the ranch, and they knew 
they would have much besides the renewing 
of old associations to wonder at and enjoy. 
There was little change to be noted in Car- 
neiro itself as the train drew up at the sta- 
tion, except that it now wore the halo of a 
promise of having, before another year, a bet- 
ter station, for which the Romantic fondly 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 165 

noped the new president of the Union Pa- 
cific, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, as a Boston 
man, would employ Richardson as the archi- 
tect. But the Enthusiast was waiting as of 
yore with the carriage, and with the grateful 
tidings that “ Beautiful Morn ” had presented 
the Firm with a fine little Jersey heifer. All 
went merrily, till the Romantic, as they 
approached the house and she saw the flag 
usually raised in honor of visitors hangingat 
half-mast, exclaimed in dismay, 

“Why, what is the matter! Is Grant 
dead ? ” 

“ Not that I know of. What in the world 
is the trouble?” asked curiously the Enthu- 
siast, of the ladies on the piazza. 

“Why, you left the flag for John to raise, 
you know, and there was something the mat- 
ter with the halyards so that he couldn’t. But 
I hated not to have the flag up at all, so I 
told him to try and get it up part way at 
least," and it was quite five minutes before 
the good lady who explained could under- 
stand the merriment of the visitors who had 
been with such an effort greeted by a flag at 
half-mast. 


1 66 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


At luncheon there was a glass of Beauti- 
ful Morn’s cream at the plate of the Man of 
Resources. It was merely a compliment ; 
for the golden draught, looking exactly like 
a glass of custard, was quite too rich to drink ; 
but it was very good to look at. Then in 
the afternoon he was taken to see his timber 
claim. He remembered how two years be- 
fore three of them had gone over the ground, 
one boring hastily a little hole in the earth, 
another, with quantities of little twigs looking 
like riding-whips, of which he could clasp a 
hundred in one hand, sticking one of these 
carelessly into the hole, a third giving the 
loose earth a hurried stamp till the entire 
“ claim ” was planted. He remembered 
wondering if by any possibility a single one 
of those rootless twigs would be alive the 
next morning. Now at the end of two years 
he was shown a beautiful little forest, low 
but thrillingly alive, in which apparently no 
twig had failed to assert itself, so that the 
heavy growth had been thinned out more 
than once, and it was no longer possible to 
ride on horseback between the rows. 

But this was nothing to a story told at 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 167 

dinner. I do not expect you to believe it, 
but you may like to hear it, especially as it 
is true. Mr. P — , a neighbor about a mile 
and a half from the ranch, had planted, in 
soil turned that year for the first time, part 
of one ear of pop-corn from which he raised 
a crop that filled two barrels. A single grain 
fell by accident into a potato hill about 
sixty feet distant from where the rest was 
planted, and produced a stalk from which 
were picked seventeen ears of corn, on which 
by actual count, there were found to be six 
thousand five hundred and eighteen grains! 

Then there were equally wonderful stories 
of the little city of Ellsworth, twelve miles 
away; stories of a population uearly doub- 
led ; of more than a hundred new houses 
built or contracted for ; of water-works to 
be at once constructed at an expense of 
$40,000; of Fort Harker sold to a company 
with probability of its soon having flourish- 
ing factories in place of the few dilapidated 
structures now there; of sales and re-sales of 
land at continually advancing prices ; of 
newly projected railroads from the south 
and from the north. 


1 68 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


It is always dangerous to return for a 
second summer to a place where you have 
been particularly happy once ; the degree 
of danger, indeed, being in exact proportion 
to the degree of the former happiness. The 
ranch had stood the test of three seasons ; 
would it bear that of a fourth ? They had 
dreaded the test a little, but all dread faded 
from their hearts as they gathered on the 
piazza again after dinner and felt even more 
keenly than ever before the beauty of the 
scene and the exquisite peace that seemed 
to fill every sense with gladness. On the 
further hills still lingered sunshine that 
looked like great lakes of light lying in the 
shadows ; nearer at hand the hills were cov- 
ered as with a richest velvet of soft verdure ; 
in the west the heavens were like a superb 
crimson flower with the sunset. Then later 
the white moonlight filled it all, valley and 
hill and heavens, while the breeze blew 
about them with delicious coolness and mur- 
mured out of sight like surf upon a beach. 
“In the hollow of His Hand/' is. the phrase 
coming constantly to my mind as I sit on 
that piazza on one of our superb Kansan 


THE STORY OP A RANCH. 169 

nights. For the valley is like a great hol- 
low, in the center of which our little hamlet 
nestles in a loneliness that is not lonely, 
while the hills that form the rim of the hol- 
low and shut us out from the troubled world 
are quite too far away to seem like walls 
that fret with a sense of being prisoned by 
them. I linger on these impressions because 
they are a constant surprise to me. No one 
can possibly be so astonished at my liking 
Kansas as I am myself. And so I dare to 
dwell upon its beauty for others, because-of 
a feeling that if I can like it, anybody would. 
None of our little household were at all 
addicted to country living as a rule. One 
of our relatives had voiced the general feel- 
ing in announcing decidedly, “Of men and 
trees if I cannot have a judicious mixture, I 
must say I prefer men.” So that I dare to 
trust more confidently in the charms of a 
place’ that could be so delightful to us all 
without either trees or men. 

And here on the piazza in summer even- 
ings gathered those many visitors from many 
states who had always so many stories at 
command. One of these, which a gentle- 


170 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


man from Indiana told of his little four- 
year-old daughter, deserves to be repeated. 

She had asked him one day for bananas, 
and he had told her that papa was only a 
poor preacher who could not afford bananas 
every day. Late in the afternoon she was 
seen coming back, as was supposed, from 
the house of a little playmate, with her 
apron full to overflowing of bananas and the 
professor of the neighboring academy walk- 
ing beside her, carrying for her an entire 
bunch. The father’s heart sank within 
him. 

“ Why, my little girl, where did you get 
them ? ” 

“ I preached for ’em,” was all the reply he 
could get from her. 

The next morning as he started down 
town for investigation, the landlord of the 
hotel called to him. 

“Was that your little girl in the pink 
dress and big straw hat who came by here 
yesterday afternoon ? ” 

The father feared it was. 

Then followed the story how she had 
mounted the steps, seeing a group of men 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. I 7 1 

on the piazza, and exclaimed with much 
emphasis, 

“You are very wicked men! You must 
repent ! Come to Jesus ! Come now ! ” Then 
after a pause she took off her broad-brimmed 
hat, and holding it out, said calmly, 

“Collection ! ” 

A dollar and a half had rained into the 
little hat in silver, and she had spent it all 
at the next corner for bananas. 

Then this year they had the camera. 

“ My dear,” the Man of Sense had said to 
the Parsimonious before they left New York, 
“ don’t you think we shall want to buy so 
many photographs if we go to the Yellow- 
stone that it would be wise economy to buy 
a camera and take our own pictures? ” 

“No, I don’t.” 

“ But, my dear, you can buy a camera for 
ten dollars.” 

“True ; but you can also buy them for fifty 
dollars. You would be sure to select a fifty 
dollar one. We could buy a great many 
photographs for fifty dollars. A great many 
good photographs,” with what the Man of 
Sense thought unnecessary emphasis. 


172 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


A few days after, the Extravagant re- 
marked at dinner with a fictitious cheerful- 
ness evidently born of fear, 

“ Well, my dear, I have secured the 
camera ! ” 

“The fifty dollar one !” 

“ No. O no!” 

Then after a pause, as the Parsimonious 
merely waited for particulars, he added 
with the increased cheerfulness of increased 
fear, 

“ It’s — it’s a seventy dollar one. You 
know a really good lens is as good an invest- 
ment as a diamond. It sounds expensive, 
but your money is always there. And then, 
if my pictures shouldn’t turn out well, we 
can undoubtedly buy all we want, you 
know.” 

“ If there is one person upon whom I 
look with supreme contempt,” was the sole 
reply of the lady, “ it is the man who buys 
the string of fish he brings home from a 
fishing-excursion.” 

Once at the ranch, however, the camera 
proved a source of immense amusement. 
To the astonishment of every one, andespe- 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 173 

dally of himself, the first effort of the Man 
of Sense was a great success. 

“ Why, it is really very good, — for an ama- 
teur,” admitted the Optimist. 

“ What’s an amatoor?” whispered the- 
Boy to a little bigger boy. 

“ I’m sure I don’t know; but I think it’s 
a person who isn’t very mature,” was the 
wise reply. 

Encouraged by his success, the Man of 
Resources proceeded to photograph every 
thing. Interiors were not too dark, nor 
frantic calves too light. It is generally ad- 
mitted by the profession that only amateurs 
have time to attempt the impossible, and 
that it is therefore to the accidental experi- 
ments of the inartistic that we owe some 
astonishingly good effects in the art. All the 
subjects that their artist friend had refused 
to waste time in taking, as impossible or un- 
beautiful, they now “ took ” themselves 
with the courage of the ignorant, sometimes 
with most encouraging results. None of 
them had been willing to exhibit the many 
attempts of professionals to give an idea 
of the house ; the effect had been forlorn. 


174 THE story of a ranch. 

“ But I think,” said the Optimist with a 
woman’s intuition, “ that it is only because 
they stand so far off and take in so much 
of the bare prairie that is always horrid in a 
picture. Now if you stand close to the house 
and take nothing but the house, I don’t 
believe any one will ever notice that there 
are no rose-bush or tree effects.” 

And as usual the woman’s intuition 
triumphed over high art. 

The final use to which they put their new 
toy, however, was when the Man of Re- 
sources laid the opera-glasses of the careless 
member of the family conspicuously on a 
chair, and announced, 

I’m going to take your opera-glasses, 
Sally, so that you will always know where 
they are.” 

Then there was the social excitement of 
another bride ; this time a little New York 
bride who had learned the traditions of 
Ellsworth and Carneiro and had dared to 
furnish her pretty new house on a ranch just 
as she would have furnished one in New 
York. To be invited to lunch with her at 
11 Delight ” was the social ambition of the 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 175 

founty, that one might gloat over the beau- 
tiful Tiffany silver and Louis Tiffany hang- 
ings and rare engravings and exquisite bric-a- 
brac as actually the possessions of “ bleeding 
Kansas.” It was a merry household of 
young people, for there were brothers as 
well as a bride and bridegroom, and 
no one enjoyed more than these young gen- 
tlemen themselves the story of their diffi- 
culties in unpacking and arranging the wed- 
ding gifts and trying to decide what various 
new kinds of bric-a-brac, new since they 
themselves left New York two years before, 
could be for. The anxious bride was assured 
that only the gilt top to a particularly hand- 
some lamp had arrived ; though later she 
found its rich crimson stand conspicuously 
adorning a mantle-shelf as presumably a 
rare kind of vase, and its glowing shade 
ornamenting the shelves of her china closet 
as of course a beautiful new kind of salad 
bowl. 

What is the peculiar charm about 
‘ Delight ’ which makes it bid fair to rival 
Carneiro in our affections? It is not that 
one is sensible here of what Mr. Howells’a 


176 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


little daughter once described to us as “ the 
joys of youngness/' for vve should be loth to 
acknowledge that we of Carneiro had yet 
lost the enthusiasm of youth. But we begin 
to be conscious that Carneiro is finished ; it 
is too complete, too “ well-done,” too near 
the railroad and the world. The buildings 
are all built, the roads are all laid out. 
There is no longer that pleasing uncer- 
tainty as to the location of the melon-patch, 
those wildly entertaining discussions whether 
millet or wheat had better be the chief part 
of our crop, which still exist in all their fresh- 
ness at Delight, and which inspire a weary 
graduate of Harvard who has listened as long 
as he can endure it to a discussion on George 
Eliot, to lean across for relief and ask a 
friend in what he tries to make a whisper, 

If you were I, Will, would you winter 
any hogs ? ” 

Then in the midst of college songs and 
Chopin nocturnes we adjourn to the ham- 
mocks and easy chairs of the piazza. 

“ Did you ever see quite so small a child 
on quite so big a horse?” asked suddenly 
one of the young gentlemen. 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


177 


There is seen approaching the oddest little 
figure ; a little girl, apparently only five or 
six years old and small for her age, riding, 
without a saddle and with only a halter for 
a bridle, a horse so high and big and bony 
that even without the effect of comparison 
he would have seemed enormous, but carry- 
ing the little damsel as discreetly and with 
as slow and stately a movement as if he 
supposed he were bearing a Zenobia in a 
procession of state. 

“ She is coming for the mail,” is the ex- 
planation, Delight being a station on the 
stage route. “ Her brother came the other 
day. He stood perfectly still, till I asked, 
* What do you want, sonny?’ when he 
answered sententiously, 

“ * Mail.’ 

“ ‘ For whom ? ’ 

“ ‘ Up north.’ 

“ Then he slid off the horse and I waited 
from sheer curiosity to see how he could 
possibly get on again, for he wasn’t much 
bigger than the little girl. When the time 
came, he put both arms round the horse’s 
fore leg and shinned up exactly as if it were 


178 THE STORY OF A RANCH. 

a post. I’ve no doubt the little girl will 
mount that way, too. Would you like to 
see it done ? ” 

He strode across the grass to accost the 
little equestrienne , but returned shaking his 
head. 

“ She has not yet graduated in horseman- 
ship. They draw the line at dismounting. 
She may ride, but not get off. I assured 
her that I would mount her again safely, 
but her beautiful obedience takes the form 
of supposing it to be the getting off, and not 
the getting on again, which is dangerous. 
She is bewitched with the music ; she has 
never heard any before and doesn’t know 
what it is. I expected every minute to 
hear her cry, like Dr. Holmes's little maid, 

“ Open it, open it, lady, and let me see 
the bird ! ’ 

“We must organize a series of concerts 
after we get the potatoes in, a la Mr. Hig- 
ginson of Boston, and educate the public 
taste. Think of being able to begin with 
Chopin, and having absolutely no uneduca- 
ted tastes to uproot ! She has never even 
heard any body whistle Yankee Doodle 1 ” 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


179 


The musical little maid suggests what was 
another subject of interest on this fourth 
summer of the great experiment. 

The Romantic did not believe in the theo- 
ries of Henry George ; but she felt, as Rufus 
Choate did about the theological dogmas of 
his minister, a terrible fear that there might 
be truth in them. There had not been 
wanting many to predict that the advent of 
so many large ranch owners in the country 
might be a good thing for Kansas, but a 
terribly hard thing for the poorer Kansans. 
All the arguments that they would have 
increased markets for their crops seemed to 
be over-weighed by the fact that their op- 
portunities for raising any crops at all would 
be gradually lessened. It was a terrible 
thing to her to see the Enthusiast draw up 
at a little cabin on one of their afternoon 
drives and say to the occupant, “ I drove 
over to say that I saw you were cutting the 
hay as you used to do on that piece of land 
over there, and to tell you that I bought 
that section last month.” She had dreaded 
something; not strikes and enmity, and cer- 
tainly not injustice to the poor man, for 


THE STOR y OF A RANCH. 


180 

there was no reason why a man should not 
buy all the land he wanted in Ellsworth as 
well as in New York ; but she feared un- 
kindness to the poor, in lessening their 
opportunities. Her heart sank, when the 
Enthusiast asked one day of a man they met, 

“Joe, do you suppose I can get hold of 
such and such a section ? ” and the man had 
replied, with perfect good nature and a 
laugh, but a laugh that made the Romantic 
sigh, 

“Yes, I guess so, if you want to. You 
fellers have managed to gobble up ’most 
every thing else, and I guess you can gob- 
ble up that, if you try hard ! ” 

Gobble up ! it was horrible. 

And so she had come to Carneiro for the 
fourth time with a feeling that the experiment 
must be beginning to bear fruit one way or the 
other, and that having let one summer inter- 
vene, she could better judge of changes that 
had come with time. What she saw this year 
so lightened her heart that I am glad to 
chronicle it. 

From the moment they left the cars, all 
through the time when they were driving all 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 181 

about the county, there was evident an in- 
creased thrift which bore witness to the fact 
that individuals, as well as the county, were 
gaining by the new order of things. Not a 
poor man of those they knew had moved away; 
on the contrary every house showed by a 
coat of paint, or another shed, or a red roof, 
or a new L, that those within were better 
off than they had been five years before. 
Families that in years long past had built 
themselves a shanty and had raised children 
who within ten miles of a railroad had never 
seen a locomotive, far less ridden in a steam 
car, were sending their young daughters out 
to service, to learn, not false ambition and 
dissatisfaction and tastes for finery, but quiet 
manners, and cleanly ways, and the beauty 
of pretty things, and a life that is something 
more than merely living. They were hear- 
ing music, and seeing pictures, and listening 
to things that interested them and roused 
them out of the ignoble content of being 
satisfied with having something to eat, no 
matter what, if it could only be procured 
easily, and a roof over the head, no matter 
where, and something to put on, no matter 


182 


THE STORY OF A RANCH 


how ragged and soiled. We are wont to 
lament the dangers of the town, of the over- 
crowded tenement house ; but the country 
has its temptations, and where there are a 
thousand acres of free land and fresh air forthe 
breathing, you will find some of the small- 
est, dreariest, deadliest hovels, as over- 
crowded and as squalid as any in the cities 
of New York or London. If Kansas were 
indeed a great broad open prairie, whither 
the very poor could flee from temptation 
and hunger and dirt, who would have the 
heart to shut them out from it ? But in real- 
ity there is no place where the very poor 
seem so utterly wretched as on a Kansas 
prairie. There is nothing to stimulate am- 
bition. It is easy to build a shanty and to 
raise hogs. If there is temptation in the 
towns to “ keep up appearances ” upon a 
false basis, there is perhaps a more terrible 
and dangerous temptation in a country 
where there are no appearances to keep up. 

And it is reassuring to those who dread 
the millionaires and monopolies of the great 
cities, to go for awhile and study from obser- \ 
vation the political economy of places where v 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 183 

no one is very rich. Nowhere are the very 
poor so much in danger of being crushed as 
in a community of those who are almost as 
poor. The horrible desire and efforts to 
outwit each other that are the result of 
actual want on both sides, lead to a terrible 
swiftness and greed in foreclosing on the 
slightest pretext any kind of mortgage ; to 
open boasting and rejoicing in triumphant 
deceit ; to the dulled conscience which is not 
so much willing to do bad things as dimmed 
to the perception that they are bad. With- 
in two years a most cold-blooded and heart- 
less murder was committed in Kansas ; and 
the mother of the murderer had no other 
feeling about the crime than was evident in 
her remark, “Too bad, ain’t it? I do hope 
Jake ’ll be out of jail in a few days. It's ari 
or ful busy time o' year to be in jail ! " There 
is a great deal of fallacy in the popular say- 
ing that a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous 
kind. As a rule, to have endured any thing 
ourselves tends to the feeling that it is easily 
endurable. “ O father,” said a young man 
in a recent story, speaking of a family in re- 
duced circumstances, “ they had nothing but 


184 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


bread and tea for their supper ! ” “ Bread 
and tea?” exclaimed the old man. “ Why, 
when I was their age, it was only on holidays 
that I had tea besides bread.” It is not in the 
great cities of millionaires and monopolies, 
but in the little western towns where every 
one has struggled with poverty and hard 
times, that a man has to pay five dollars to 
the bank that consents to change for him a 
five hundred dollar bill into small bills. 

So the Romantic grew daily happier 
and was quite ready on Saturday for the 
drive into town to see something of the 
Ellsworth “boom.” 

“ Isn’t that Wild Bill ?” she asked doubt- 
fully, as she surveyed the restive horses 
harnessed to the comfortable little buck- 
board. 

“ No indeed ! ” 

“ But it looks like him.” 

“ O he was Wild Bill till we bought a 
wilder one ; now he is simply Bill,” and the 
Man of Resources gathered up the reins with 
the haste born of a strong desire not to be 
forced to confess that the other horse of the 
span was the wilder Bill. 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 1S5 

In truth it was worth the trip into town to 
see the changes which two years had 
wrought. Not only were the hundred new 
houses glistening everywhere in the sun, but 
every old house seemed to be having a new 
bay-window or piazza or porch. The Opti- 
mist was delighted at being obliged to de- 
scend from the buckboard in the middle of 
the street, owing to the pressure pf teams 
near the sidewalk, it being market day. 
But the strangest of all was when a real estate 
agent approached the Man of Sense in the 
street with the suggestion that Monte Car- 
neiro was an admirable site for a new town, 
and that he should advise him to be laying 
it out in corner lots ! 

“ You may depend upon it,” commented 
the Parsimonious, “that they will spend the 
winter laying gas-pipes and rails for horse- 
cars, and the first thing to confront us when 
we come out next June will be a gas-bill.” 

They had arranged to go home by the 
Baron’s, which necessitated fording the river. 
The river was high. 

“Can we cross?” shouted the Man of 
Sense to a small boy on the other shore. 


iS 6 THE STORY OF A RANCH 

“ Of course you can.” 

Still, they were not reassured. The river 
was rarely any thing but a rather wide and 
very sluggish brook ; but now it was rushing 
along with a tremendous current, and they 
could not see bottom. 

“ If you will run and get a horse and come 
over on him to show me how deep it is,” 
shouted the Man of Resources to the boy 
again, “ I’ll give you a quarter ! ” 

Away ran the boy, reappearing not with 
a horse, but with four or five men. 

“ I’ll show you how deep it is,” said one 
of them quietly, kicking his right shoe off in 
one direction and his left in the other. 

Whereupon he proceeded to wade the 
stream in the most leisurely manner, evi- 
dently enjoying the quiet cool bath up to his 
waist. 

“ You see it's quite safe,” he remarked, as 
he climbed the steep bank on our side of the 
river. “ Or would be,” he added doubtfully, 
'as he saw the buck-board, “ if you were in a 
wagon. You’d better let me go back and 
harness up my team. Then I can drive you 
and your traps over,” surveying critically 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 187 

certain delicate shawls in the buckboard, 
“ and the boys’ll take your team across.” 

A little later they were rattling down the 
steep bank and into the river in a heavy 
wagon. There were no seats, and the Ro- 
mantic, standing upright, grasped firmly 
with her right hand the high side of the 
wagon, and with her left the back of the 
driver’s seat, with feelings which she has 
since described in saying, 

“ I always did want to know how the 
woman at the circus feels when she is driving 
one of those Roman chariots; and now I 
know.” 

There were less exciting drives that were 
not less interesting. Sometimes along the 
road the open door of a pig-sty or a hen- 
house disclosed the remarkable legend, care- 
fully printed in white paint on the inside, 
“ Squad Room No. 2.” These doors were 
accounted for by the recent sales of sashes, 
window-frames, etc., from buildings at Fort 
Harker to be removed for statelier ones. 
Sometimes they would come suddenly upon 
a line of low hills transformed by some 
magic effect of light and shade into a won- 


i88 


THE STORY OF A RANCH. 


derful landscape. Once the surface of these 
hills was in complete shadow from a passing 
cloud, while deep hollows between them 
glowed with brightness. 

“ It is like Tuckerman’s ravine filled with 
sunshine instead of snow,” explained the 
Romantic. 

Very often these drives would end in the 
hayfields, where it was like going to a summer 
opera to watch the latest of the labor-saving 
machines : the great “ stacker ” with its 
attendant satellites of “ go-devil ” rakes. 
The rakes themselves had been improved in 
the two years. Now they were drawn by 
two horses, working twenty feet apart, with 
the rake between them, driven hither and 
thither over the field by a man on a little 
adjustable seat behind, who at the proper 
moment ran the teeth of his rake in between 
the corresponding teeth of a rack on the 
stacker, leaving his load deposited on the 
rack. A signal, and a small boy who has 
been asleep under the growing haystack 
starts from his slumbers, and hastens forward 
a poor old horse whose treadmill consists of 
about twenty feet of prairie, and who, as he 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


189 


darts forward only to draw suddenly back 
again, raises the rack of hay by ropes to the 
top of the stack, where men stand in waiting 
to give the finishing touch with a few 
graceful passes of the pitchfork. 

How was it possible to tear themselves 
away from pleasures such as these to go to 
the Yellowstone? The Youngest stoutly 
refused to leave the ranch for the finest 
Yellowstone ever invented. He would go if 
they would give him a watch, but under no 
other conditions. The Man of Sense was in 
league with his young son, and did not see 
why in the world they should go off to the 
north-west. But the Romantic was firm. 
See the Yellowstone they must, though she 
would graciously consent to come back to 
the ranch in October for the shooting — and 
for her boy. 


190 


THE STOR Y OF A RANCH. 


CAMERON’S HERD. 

Across the prairie, thinking it is theirs, 

The foolish sheep go wandering at will ; 

Or, shepherded by tempting grass that snares 
Their idle fancy, stand content and still. 

The herdsman with his collie lingers near : — 

“ The laird owns a’ the bonnie brae ; but, Flo, 
I ken it’s mair our ain, who a’ the year 

Bide here, whatever airt the wind may blow.” 

The while an unseen artist subtly caught 
The tawny fields unspotted by a stone, 

The wandering sheep, nay, even the herder’s 
thought, 

And made the fields, the sheep, the man, his 
own. 

And she who saw the picture in the town 

Thought for herself alone the gracious 
dower ; — 

The sheep were there, the prairie was so brown, 
That she might charm away an idle hour. 

But I who write have caught the lady, too — 
Prisoned her in my verse ; now all are mine ! — 
Dear reader, for whose patient ear I sue, 

£.ea<3 but my verse^ ar \ 6 , all of these are thine,. 






























































































































































































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